We started the day off by waking up and eating breakfast at the Monastery, and then headed out to the beach. There some of us girls competed in a four on four sand tournament. The tournament was pretty competitive; we played against the Cincinnati College team and also against an Italian team. We lost in a close game to the Cincinnati team but beat the Italian team in a great match. The rest of the time at the beach was spent playing in the water and buying fake designer souvenirs from men selling them on the beach.

We ate lunch at a restaurant at the beach and were so hungry from all of our activities that we ate all of the pizza at the restaurant and they ran out of pizza dough.

After lunch we headed back to the Monastery to take a little nap and relax before our match that night.

We walked from the Monastery to a cute little Italian restaurant for dinner and ate some more pasta and were surprised by French fries. It was a nice treat to have a cappuccino before the game. Then we walked from the restaurant to our site of competition.

Our match was held on top of an old castle overlooking all of the mountains. It was absolutely breathtaking. When we got there we couldn’t resist taking pictures of all the girls and the gorgeous scenery.

Then we started warming up and preparing ourselves for a big match against Czech Republic. When we finished our warm up, we got ready for our introductions to the crowd. We were introduced and then huddled with our coach Mitja to discuss the game plan. We talked about how we needed to cut down on our mistakes and focus on playing as a team, since we have only played together once. Then the refs blew their whistles and we headed out on the court for the game to start.

We were surprised by their deep corner shots that scored a lot, and they were able to carry out the win against us in the first game 25-23. The second game we decided to pick it up by relying on the middles more and we won the second game 25-18. We kept that up for the third game and won that one also 25-20. The fourth game we had a rocky start and we slipped to a 0-7 start. We tried to claw our way back the rest of the game but it wasn’t enough and we lost 25-23. The fifth game we were ready to battle, but got off to a bad start and couldn’t fight our way back and we lost 15-11.

After the game Mitja told us that he was proud of all the progress that we have made and that we can only get better. Even after the loss, Mitja took us all to get gelato. The gelato was delicious, and afterwards we walked back to the Monastery and went to sleep.

For more information, and some great photos, please see the past years journals: