Day 1: Welcome to Nic

Hello all!

I'm Tess Reid and I will be taking you through LMU Volleyball's trip to Nicaragua.

Last night the team moved out of the Leaveys, ate our last American meal (Benny's of course), and departed for LAX. 

To say the very least... we were ecstatic. We made our way through customs alongside our coaches, administrators, and foam rollers, and waited for our Red Eye to Houston. We arrived in Houston too early for any talking, so napping became the main event in gate E11. And once again, we waited.

On our flight to Managua, I lucked out with a window seat, and as we descended into the city, my eyes were committed to scanning every last piece of the area. Everything below us was extremely green and lush. There weren't a lot of roads, instead, lakes and mountains covered the country. As we got closer to the ground, the colors of the city became extremely vibrant. Green, pink, blue, and yellow art pieces covered the city. It seemed like we were landing in a giant adult playground.

As our group shuffled out of the airport corralling all 22 of our checked bags, we stepped through the glass doors into the sweet Nicaraguan air...and immediately started sweating. Leggings in 90 degree heat and humidity on Los Angeles residents do not coincide. We made our way to our hotel, IMMEDIATELY changed into shorts, and got our first Nicaraguan meal; a chicken and bean burrito.

After lunch, we had about two hours until we left to play the Nicaraguan national team. Oh yeah... 12 hours of travel, eat a burrito, enjoy two hours off, play some volleyball! We were on a tight schedule.

Around 4:15pm the group huddled onto our bus and drove across Managua to the national training center. Entering the site, the baseball and soccer fields caught our eyes with their bright colors, but we found our way to the volleyball court and walked into a beautiful (hot) gym waiting for us.

Although putting on my knee pads could've been considered my warm up, we worked through our arm progression, blocking trips, and out of system setting for about 45 minutes. Then, we were ready for our 6 o'clock game. The only problem was there was only one or two players from the Nicaragua team in the entire gym. No one seemed worried or in a rush, but we were ready to go. We waited, warmed up a bit more, and spent a little too long trying to put on our long sleeve jerseys over our exceedingly sweaty arms.

Finally, the match started around 7pm. The first set, the Nicaraguan team won 25-20. In our huddle, we talked about playing a little bit looser. We reset and played like we had the entirety of double days prior to our departure. That led us to victory in last three sets, winning 25-16, 27-25, and 25-8.

After the match, we headed back to our bus as collectively the most sweaty group of people ever, and headed to dinner. We talked and laughed over no-wifi and spaghetti as we recounted the events of today and looked forward to tomorrow.

Talk to you then,

Tess :)