Missing volleyball again.
It's been a year since I last played volleyball, and I don't know whether I'll ever get the chance again. Even now, every so often, I catch myself sighing: "Ah, I really want to play volleyball." That's the honest feeling in my chest. Since leaving campus life behind, I can never seem to gather enough people — or find a court.
Volleyball is nearly impossible to play alone. By yourself, you can only hit against a wall, and if you practice serves, you have to run to the other side to fetch the ball back. With two people, you can bump it back and forth and rally for fun; with a few more, you stand in a circle and keep the ball in the air; scrape together three-on-three and you finally get to use a net, and each side can even have someone play setter; only when you've assembled a full six-on-six can you call it a proper match. In the university tournaments, a department often couldn't field six players on its own, and two or three departments would have to bunch together into a single team.
Volleyball is not easy to pick up. At the start, every touch sends the ball flying off wherever it pleases. You have to begin with the very first bump and build slowly, until you can string together a hundred in a row — only then do you have the faintest feel for the ball. Then next time, with a different ball, or your body in a different state, that feel may be gone again. Once your bumping is decent, you can try folding in control of direction and force. A little more fluent, and you can try receiving serves and spikes — no matter how fast the ball comes across, what leaves your arms on its way to a teammate must travel in a soft arc. And once bumping is second nature, you can move on to setting and attacking.
Sounds tedious, doesn't it? And yet this is the sport that draws me like nothing else. Nothing else.
What makes volleyball interesting is its rules: you can't hold the ball; no player may hit it twice in succession; you have at most three touches to send it back over; any part of the body may strike it; players stand in a fixed order, rotating clockwise...
It's exactly these rules that make volleyball a team sport. As long as you're on the court, whatever role you carry, you will have to receive, you will have to serve — there will always be a moment that belongs to you. In a match, no one can ever play volleyball alone: you need your teammates, and your teammates need you. Your good ball is the team's good ball; your error is the team's error. That is simply the kind of sport volleyball is.
It's the feeling of handing your whole body and mind over to the team.
On the court, the ball comes over from the other side, and in that instant you know it will land near you. You know you're going to take it; you know you will get it up; you know you'll deliver it into the setter's hands; you know the setter may well send it right back to you; and you may rise up and try to hammer it home. You may have rehearsed this sequence more times than you can count.
Just the same, the instant a different ball comes over, you know it belongs to your teammate. You trust completely that he'll handle it — and if he doesn't, you know you'll be diving to save it, and you know every other teammate is thinking exactly the same thing.
There is no previous ball, and there is no next ball; your one shared aim is to play this ball well. In that moment you slip into bullet time. Your senses dilate without limit: you can feel the thread running to each of your teammates, feel the relationship between you and the ball, feel the wind moving over your face. In sports, this feeling is called the zone.
You have no time at all to think about the last ball. All you have is this ball; all you have is this moment. If your mind is still on the previous play, gnawing over what you did wrong, your body will betray that divided attention as a beat of hesitation.
The feeling is simply too good — a group of people fused into one body for the sake of every single ball.
A teammate is the person who knows how to bring you back when your head isn't in it, who knows exactly how high you like your sets, and who knows better than anyone where your weaknesses live. We encouraged each other, practiced together, kept getting better.
I don't know where I could ever find a substitute for that feeling.
Volleyball and I were always a little bit fated. In high school, I got dragged in to round out the numbers for the class tournament; I didn't play much, but I practiced plenty. Then in college I joined the school tournaments and started playing a little more often, and I found an enormous amount of joy in it.
Looking back, I spent my college years forever finishing coursework and grinding for high exam scores, and missed many, many games of volleyball along the way. Now that I want to play, the chances are gone.
Ah, I really want to play volleyball.