Volleyball World

Welcome to a whole new world. Brooke has been practicing for over 6 weeks with a new volleyball team. They are called Club Union. It is basically a polynesian team with some white girls thrown in. The head coach of the teams is Coach Sam Vaitai. He started this club because he noticed several years ago that the polynesian girls weren't playing on the high school teams. The reason is to play on a high school team you pretty much have to play "Club" volleyball and "club" volleyball can be very expensive. So he does this without pay or compensation and volunteers a lot of time to this club. So, we're benefitting too.
Brooke likes to play volleyball and decided to try it out. Here she is in the left corner in one of her first time's playing in a tournament.
Their first tournament was last weekend and that was an eye opening event. It was Friday from 3:30 to 10:00 pm and Sat from 7:45a to 8:00p. She was there the whole time Friday and Saturday and probably played a total of 10 minutes.
Her team is pretty good but she is definitely not a starter and spent most of the time on the bench. It's frustrating as a parent but she had a good attitude about it.
It was crazy there - a huge warehouse converted into volleyball courts. There were 11 courts there and 48 teams playing in this tournament. It's amazing how many 13-14 year old girls out there that are AWESOME volleyball players. We watched a lot of great play during the tournament.



This is Brooke's team with her coach before one of their games. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the season goes.