Over the weekend, Luxembourg hosted Novotel Cup featuring four women's and four men's teams. As Denmark played in the women's tournament, I went to watch the match (my country of residence vs my country of birth), to get some impressions, to shoot some photos ...and to learn something.
As you see, it is a bit of a challenge to take photos of such a fast-moving sport. That's why the ball is not actually on any of the pix...
Denmark won by 3 sets to 1 (27:25, 22:25, 25:22, 25:16) in an even match over two hours. The star players — to someone who does not know a great deal about volleyball — seem to be the continuously concentrated captain and motivator Mia Kloth-Jørgensen (who with her 1.69 m looks very small next to the generally very tall players), the straightforward smasher Lykke Degner (1.91 m of sporty beauty!), as well as athletic Hansen and elegant Kyhn. Those were the names on their jerseys; I am, however, not sure of their correctness as there are discrepancies between the official tournament programme and the Danish Volleyball Association's website.
The real star though is the team itself. Volleyball is a team game in its purest sense, and if you are used to for example soccer, it may seem confusing that the team members get together between every single ball, won or lost, to bond, congratulate, motivate, keep up team spirit no matter what. Given that most ball exchanges last around 5 seconds till one team scores a point, and rarely over 20 seconds, the bonding ritual is very frequent.
A lot of teams, not only in sports, can learn from this!
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