Sibillini 2007
Entry #6 Comunanza Day 4
July 4
By Dylan Faulkner, Wake Forest

Today we rode with the Hungarian team on their bus down to the beach. Two of our four beach teams (we were playing 3 vs. 3) made it to the second round of the beach tourney; one from Third Degree and the other from Volleyhut. Third Degree lost their first match, but Kelsey Bowers, Gale Tripp and I ended up winning the whole tournament.

For the rest of the day both teams tanned on the beach and most of our girls decided to get henna tattoos. Many of the girls bought souvenirs from the vendors on the beach and had a good time bargaining with them.

We left the beach around 2:00pm to go back to Casa Gioiosa and take a nap before our games. It started to rain after Third Degree played so our match was moved to an inside court jut outside of Comunanza. We were the second game and didn’t end up starting our game until 11:30pm! It was a bit of a fiasco, but we’re learning to “go with the flow”. We played against Rudar from Montenegro and the game started off very slowly. We won games one and two, and then kind of fell apart and starting making a lot of errors. We lost the third game after almost fighting back at the end, and won the fourth easily to cinch winning our pool with a record or 3-0. When we finally ended the game it was around 1:45am so we immediately went back to Casa Gioiosa to sleep. Overall it was a pretty successful day.

Team Third Degree’s match, by Katie Pierucci, Davidson University

In our final match of pool play we faced the Italian team. We were expecting the Italians to have a home-crowd advantage, but it turned out that we still had many loyal fans in the stands.  As usual, we went on an early run thanks to aggressive serving.  Our opponents were clearly a younger bunch, so they struggled to pass our jump serves, paralyzing their offense.   When we let up on our serving, the Italians battled back. They played a much slower game of volleyball than we were used to, but this didn’t always work to our advantage.  Anticipating the usual big hitters of college volleyball, our talented defense struggled to adjust to the off speed shots and miss-hits of our smaller opponents.  In the end, however, our more mature and sophisticated style of play prevailed.  We won the match 3-0 and finished pool play in first place, without dropping a single game.  Bracket play would begin the following day and we quickly refocused, now even more confident and determined to win the tournament.

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