STI Volleyball - starting all over

There is a saying that goes - the first is always the hardest. Well that is true for the STI College Olympians Volleyball team as their first foray into an STI Volleyball program seems to be a long and winding road to respectability. Five years ago, STI College tapped its champion team STI College Sta. Rosa to represent the network in the NAASCU wars. The STI Sta. Rosa team did not disappoint for they placed respectably in the first year that they played and then eventually made it to the finals and lost out in a great battle against St. Clare College.

Things change, students graduate and new ones come along. Thus after those years the STI network started to tinker on the possibility of creating a manila based team. Unfortunately, since Volleyball is not really a sport that is played by a lot of people, it was hard to form a team with a limited budget to start with. Last year, STI College Taft helped out in creating a team for men and women. Again the lack of interest among a lot of students resulted in the formation of a men's team only. We did not even complete the women's team. The men lost all their 4 games.

This year became year one of the Volleyball program. The directive is to form a team and join the league knowing full well that the others member schools will have an easy time beating us considering the STI teams had just barely a month of practice and familiarity is quite hard since Volleyball really relies a lot on team play. We first wanted to create a team of students mainly from STI College Global City. Word came around and volleyball die hards from Taft and Quezon Avenue made it to the team final 12. The Men's team is composed of 12 players while the women's team had only 10 players.

As of this blog writing, our story was just like a well written script that both teams followed - both went down in straight sets in three games. Looking at how the teams played it all boiled down to familiarity and getting used to the competition. The lack of maturity showed and the team defense was indeed something the team will have to improve on. I told Coach Philip Salaysay, once a national team athletics member and a volleyball player then himself, that what the team needs is more tune up games in the future so that they can address the loopholes that we saw during the tournament.

Again, creating a respectable team that will compete at a high level in tournaments that you will enter requires a lot of seasoning and experience. By starting a team now, we hope that we can click the right buttons in getting the needed players and training them for the next season. The season is not year over but we hope to improve on this performance to be able to become competitive in the next two to three years. But unfortunately, until that time comes we have to swallow the bitter pill of watching our teams lose big time. GO STI...lets do it.