발 리볼: Bal-li-bol part 3

Here is a weekend wrap-up to my three-part volleyball story. When we left off on Thursday night, I had played for an hour with the Anyang Besamo volleyball team. That was a lot of fun, but not rewarding in a competitive sense, and the gym time / practice is during my work day. This weekend was to be my first taste of another volleyball club.

I should explain a few things about Korean volleyball first. The first thing is the structure of amateur volleyball. As far as I can tell, instead of having amateur leagues in a particular place (such as Urban Rec, the VGVA or Volleyball BC in Vancouver), they organize themselves by amateur teams. On Thursday night, I actually went to a team practice. Now, these are amateur teams, so the last half of practice was a big scrimmage - exactly what I wanted. I'm not entirely sure, but it's a fair bet that clubs from different cities also play against each other in arranged games. There are also tournaments - I've already been invited to one in May.

(Also, a side note: "Baesamo" [배사모] is the Anyang team's team name. It is a Korean-style shortening for "Volleyball Lovers Community" - bae for 배구 [baegu], which is volleyball; sa for 사랑 [sarang], for love, and mo for 모아서 [moaseo] which means club or community.)

The Gunpo Dolphins, from a photo on their website.

The second thing is about game play. I am used to good old 6-a-side volleyball, with rotation, playing back and front row, three hitters and three blockers, etc. Not so in Korea. They play with East Asian rules, which means:

• Nine players a side. Fortunately, the court is slightly bigger.


• No rotation. This is my volleyball dream! I can play middle the whole game.


• Anyone on the court can hit or block. Yep, this means that there are generally 5 blockers, which means triple blocks are commonplace. But there are also generally 4 or 5 hitters, which is ridiculous.


• Wicked cross-court cuts, due to the extra court width and the need to cut around a triple block all the time.

It is generally a faster-paced and tremendously fun version of volleyball. I'm not used to a few things, such as not being the only middle. (I tend to try to hit both my sets and the higher middle sets... need to work on that.) However, I'm quickly getting used to the non-rotation thing.

I think I have given away by now that I have played more volleyball this weekend. In fact, I played lots of volleyball this weekend.

It all started with 종열 (Jong Yeul, but we'll call him by his English name, James). James is the manager of the Anyang Baesamo, and was my first contact at the club. He speaks broken English and so has served as my translator for the rest of the volleyball players. He called me on Saturday morning, and after about two minutes, I figured out that he was asking me to play volleyball with him that day. Of course I agreed, and about half an hour later he met me and 윤표 (Yun Pyo) in my building and we set off. We drove for about an hour south to Asan, where we joined the Asan team for their practice/scrimmage. This was very tiring and fun - but very far away!

I learned on the ride to Asan that Yun Pyo lives in the same building as me! He doesn't speak very much English at all, but he's a fairly good setter so worth getting to know. We made an arrangement (through translator James) to go to Gunpo today to play yet more volleyball!

The gym at Gunpo is only about a 10 minute drive away from where I live, and is home to the Gunpo Dolphins. The practice started with warmup, then drills, then a few scrimmages. Before the last scrimmage, James informed me that we were playing "for lunchee", which he elucidated meant that the losing team had to pay for lunch that day.

Fortunately, we won! We went and had a spicy Korean octopus dish - yummy! - drank 막걸리 (makgeolli, pronounced mokkly, which is a sweet rice wine) and generally had a good time. I think my legs were more worn down from sitting on the floor eating than playing volleyball, though.

All told, it was a great weekend full of physical activity and fun. I made a few new friends and will be returning to Gunpo on Sundays to practice with the team. I think my digging will sure improve with the drills they do! And although I spent most of my weekend surrounded by people with whom I had very little language in common, I found that it didn't matter. As I told James, he may not speak much English, and I don't speak much Korean, but we both speak volleyball.