Ouch!

As I previously mentioned, last week Maddie was at Volleyball camp.  It was three hours everyday and we specifically chose this camp because they offered a defensive playing course.  The one thing that we noticed, and her coaches tried to stress was that Maddie needed to learn to be more aggressive with the ball. This particular camp is also run by a group that does volleyball 24/7 and we had heard that the camps were very worthwhile.

After the first day, Maddie was sore.  After the second day, she was even more sore.  I think she just assumed she'd never feel normal after the third day and stopped complaining.

However, the evidence of how hard she was trying to improve was pretty obvious:

They practiced a lot of diving for the ball.  Obviously she was doing something wrong the first few days, but as she told my sister by the end of the week, she thought she had figured out what she was doing wrong and wasn't getting as many bruises.

The inside of her elbows (though hard to see here) were pretty banged up.  One of her knees had a bruise that was probably the size of half a dollar bill.

(That scar on the left is the remains of her cooking incident I posted about here.)

At the end of the week she also said she felt they had "fixed" her serve.  She wasn't expecting to improve her serve at a "defensive" camp so she was pretty happy about that.

This week she's at a different volleyball camp, but only two hours per day.  This will probably seem like a walk in the park.  In August she starts back with practice for fall volleyball through her school.  She's already decided she'll be putting in some regular practice time to make sure she's ready.  Guess we better get some more band-aids.