Working Woman

     I have been coaching our B team since the middle of November. Most of the girls are around 16 years old, with a few younger and a few older. We run their practice twice a week on Mondays, 16:00-17:30, and Thursdays, 17:30-19:30. We have been working on a lot of ball control and free ball passing along with arm swing. One of the dads, Stefan, is also at all of the practices with us. We asked him if we could get some tennis balls. We have implemented using the tennis balls to learn the correct arm swing. The girls are all improving a lot! They can all throw the tennis balls great, but we are still working on them transferring that into actual hitting. They are still improving every practice though. It is nice that all of them speak great English that we don’t need to have someone translating to them what we want them to do. We have even taught them some American volleyball terms that do not translate, like shag! Whenever we yell out shag, the girls all know to run and pick up all the balls.

     December 15^th was the B team’s first match after Christmas. Unlike my team, they started a new league with new teams. They beat Lund in 3 sets. December 21^st was the second match. Unfortunately, they lost in 5 sets to Ystad. Ystad had two really tall good middles that we struggled to stop. We played really up and down as well. We lost the first two sets by like 10, then the third set we were winning 18-1! We won the third and fourth sets, before dropping the fifth and final set. Although we didn’t play consistently, I was still proud of how well the girls played. They were even missing one of our starting outsides and middles. I think we will be able to beat them when we play them in Ljungby.

     Meghan and I have also started working at a factory in Ljungby! It reminds me of my days working at Enduro factory in Washington, MO. We worked on Wednesday from 13-16 and Thursday & Friday from 8-12, but we aren't sure when we will be working next. It is a graphic production factory called JOMAGP, but we like to call it JoMeg. :) We worked packaging the different printouts. Meghan did a couple different jobs like laminating papers, putting postage and labels on envelopes, and the same job that I did. I was a Plastic Wrap Specialist! Here is a step-by-step picture explanation of what I did:

Pick up stack of handouts.

Slide handouts into the plastic wrap.

Align handouts on corner of machine.

Press green button for top to come down.

Peel away excess plastic wrap.

Repeat hundreds of times!

We finished the job a little early on Friday so we also got to put together some boxes!