Passion.
In so many ways, volleyball has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with a genuine love of the game and a will to win. Often times in volleyball, you'll see girls wearing shirts that have corny sayings on them like, "Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard." Although it sounds corny, in some ways, it's true.
I still have a very vivid memory of a volleyball game I played when I was in the seventh grade. My team was down, and the score was 9-22. My coach called a time out, and told us that only we controlled the outcome of this game. We could give up now, and accept the loss, or we could fight. My team decided that we were going to fight.
When we got back on the court, we started playing like we were tied with the opposing team, not down by 13 points. And guess what happened? (I'm sure you can guess because if anything else happened I wouldn't be telling this story.) We started catching up. And with every pointed we earned we gained more and more momentum. And the more momentum we gained, the more excited we became.
At the end of the game, the score was 26-24. Us.
Passion isn't everything. Obviously if the U.S. national team played a local middle school's team, and they played with absolutely no passion, and the middle school team played with all the passion in the world, the U.S. national team would still win.
Passion is not a synonym for miracle. Rather, passion is the deciding factor in those close matches. It's the part of the game that players can't be taught; they have to simply have that drive inside of them.
Before every game my high school team played at our state tournament, there was an inspirational speech we would watch to get us ready for the game. (Click here to view it yourself.) Now I can't say that we won every game we played at the state tournament, but I can say that we played with as much heart and drive as we've ever played with. And I think that was why, after every tournament, we left the court feeling like winners.
