There will be no junior training at the leisure centre on Friday 16 June as the weather forecast is good. Instead the training will take place on the Recreation Ground at Anchor Road from 18:45 to 19:30. It will be followed by a fun game to which adults are invited as well.
As in previous summers we suggest a donation of £1 that will be used to buy new balls.
On Saturday Calne Comets hosted for the first time a SWVA mini-volleyball grand-prix tournament. The grand-prix sees junior teams from across the south-west region competing on a monthly basis to win their age group category in the season-long grand-prix series.
This was the first time that the grand-prix has come to Calne and there were teams from Bristol, Bournemouth, Devizes, Ivybridge and Plymouth as well as Calne competing at Calne Leisure Centre.
It was a successful tournament for Calne Comets with their U12 boys team using home advantage to go one better than their runners-up spot in the previous round to be overall winners despite losing one match to Plymouth.
In the U13 boys category Devizes (under the banner of Wiltshire Mavericks) held eventual winners to a draw but had to settle for the runners-up spot.
Calne had two teams (Calne Galaxy and Calne Milky Ways) in the U15 girls category. Calne Milky Ways had been undefeated last season and despite this being their first grand-prix of the current season they picked up from they left off scoring 88 points in their four games to only 37 conceded. Despite being a new partnership Calne Galaxy were able to win all their matches except against the Milky Ways to claim the runners-up spot.
The Meteorites won their first match this season when they defeated Olympiad B 25-19 27-25 23-25. The team was Stuart, Cliff, Ben, Anji, Charlie, Ben, Marketa, David, Chessie and Harriet.
The juniors held a joint training session with Bristol Spikers at Wellsway School.
It is official we have a star in our club! Volleyball England has announced that Serena has been awarded one of six awards awards for safeguarding by the Child Protection in Sport Unit. Congratulations to Serena.
In a tournament that coach Cliff Ball described as hard-fought, Calne Comets were the winners of the plate competition.
The fixtures for the new season have been published. These have been updated to include the dates of the Ladies and Junior tournaments.
Training for the new season starts on Friday 2 September at Calne Leisure Centre with the juniors starting at 7PM and the adults at 8PM. New players of any experience as well as existing players are welcome.
If you are a BBC radio presenter with the challenge of trying as many Olympic sports as possible while the Olympic Games are taking place in Rio then you are going to want to try volleyball. Of course you need a coach to teach you the basics and convey to your listeners that volleyball is a fun sport. That is what happened this morning on BBC Radio Oxford and who was the coach?
Step forward Jenny Boorman from Calne Comets.
Despite only have a few minutes before going on air, Jenny managed to teach the presenter Lilley Mitchell enough about volleyball that she mentioned making a flat surface with her arms when digging and creating a star (well close enough Jenny normal refers to a diamond shape) in front of her forehead when setting – concepts that we recognise from Jenny’s sessions here in Calne. It all sounded good fun and you can listen to the recording on iPlayer for the next 30 days (the bit with Jenny starts at time 02:22:15).
The Meteorites have not had the best of seasons but despite losing the final match of the season to Wootton Bassett Aces. The Aces went in to the match in second place looking for promotion to the premier division and might have expected the bottom-of-the-table Meteorites to be a push over. However the Meteorites were fielding as strong a team as they have all season with Neil playing as setter, Ben as opposite, Marketa and Matt in the middle and Kat and Anji in the outside positions.
The Meteorites started well racing into a 6-1 lead in the first set leaving the Aces in doubt that they had some work to do. Unfortunately the Meteorites could not keep the momentum going against the serving of experienced Irwin Aiken (with our setter at position six) losing six points in succession and eventually losing the set 25-15. In the second set the Meteorites were once again fighting for every point up leading until we got to that troublesome rotation with the setter at position 6, although they kept in touch until the score was 12-13 down when before the Aces scored four successive points and were able to maintain that lead to win the second set 25-17. Again in the third set the Meteorites managed to build a lead this time getting to 10-4 mainly thanks to some big serving from Matt and let the lead slip until taking a time-out at 13:19 down before battling back when Matt served again to lead 22-21. Three set points were lost before the Meteorites eventually lost the final set 28-26 but with a lot of honour gained. Marketa was nominated as the Meteorites’ MVP but it could easily have been any one of the six players who had battled so well.