Volleyball sucks... or maybe just losing

Nothing like a solid loss to your biggest rival school at home to make a great blog post.
My name is Daniela Arenas and I am currently playing volleyball as a freshman at Rice University. Volleyball is my passion and it always will be, and I'm a competitor, which makes losing kind of difficult. Last night we got beat by the University of Houston in our own gym (even more of a gut wrench-er).
The match was neck-and-neck the entire time but we just couldn't find a way to finish the game. Regardless of the fact that we all wanted the win more than anything. We had your standard team "pow wows", where everyone puts in their share of what they want to do that night and how they want to be effective. We had a great warm-up everyone was nailing their passes (when the ball is served and the defender bumps the ball directly to the target/setter), and putting holes in the floor with their swings (When the ball is set and the hitter attacks it hard). We knew we were going to win this game.

But somehow it just didn't go our way. The first set was close; both team were siding out fairly quickly (when the opposing team is serving and your team wins the point to regain serve) but then when it was 19-19, Houston just took us on a run based off of our errors to win the game 25-19. We hung in their for longer in the second game but Houston eventually won that one 26-24. The third game was exactly the same, we just couldn't hang in their long enough to finish the game and we lost 25-22.
We were devastated but we will come out next game even more ready to win.