The first of the 2 trips will be to Taichung, Taiwan to take the junior girls volleyball team to their end of season volleyball tournament. It is kind of a funny system of school sports games here at an international school where instead of a regular season and playoff games spread throughout the year, we instead have a single big tournament at the end of the season with the possibility for smaller tournaments throughout the year. This is actually the first year TIS has had a volleyball team at any level and so it is definitely a really exciting experience. The teams (both junior teams will play in Taiwan next week) have been practicing for a good 4 months and the anticipation and nervous energy is steadily building throughout the past weeks.
The hype level really ramped up a notch the last week as we had a pep rally for the players of both teams and the players got their first taste of a real game through a mini-tournament TIS hosted for the local schools. For the pep rally, I had been taking sports posteresque photos of each player, and putting together a "meet the team" video for that pep rally. There was definitely some trepidation amongst the players as they've not had this kind of attention thrown upon them likely ever before, but overall the other students really got behind them and the presentation was really well executed.
TIS managed to pull together a set of informal games with other local Macau schools this past weekend for both the junior teams. For all of our players, it was the first time they had ever played a real volleyball match and it really did serve as a good learning experience for our big tournament in Taiwan. The local schools are all pretty talented but our girls team did manage to stretch out a set point in one of the games and battled tough in all 3 games despite some pretty frigid conditions and the fact that was were missing our team captain and starting setter for the day. The boys similarly did really well and even managed to pull out a few set wins. Overall, the mini-tournament served as a barometer of what needs improving and a chance for players to get a small taste of what to expect in Taiwan.
To follow with up-to-date information about our tournament in Taiwan check our the TIS volleyball travel blog at:
http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog/tis/19/tpod.html
You can also check out:
http://forum.tis.edu.mo/sports/?p=987
The pep rally video photos at the end were single-handed shot, edited, and put together by yours truly. A TON of work for 6ish minutes of run-time but really fulfilling and worthwhile nonetheless.
As for my other trip to Taiwan, that will be for the grade 7 experience week trip. If you don't already know, our experience week is a week long educational field trip to help student define their global identity through exploration of difference cultures and assisting in social welfare projects. Currently we are in the stages of sorting out visas and other important travel documents with the students. It is a bit of a headache sorting out who's handed in what, especially since the consequences of any bookkeeping errors could result in students being stranded at the Taiwan border! I expect experience week to be an exhausting but enjoyable trip. Regardless the specific outcome, this ought to be a very good learning experience for me, as next year I will be the trip organizer for the grade 7 experience week trip... yikes!
Well that's it for now. I'll leave you with our junior girls volleyball team poster, the rest of pictures are in the slideshow. Make sure to check out those links above during the coming weekend, they should be updated frequently.
The work on the video was worth it -- it's awesome!
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