Fiesta Tournament (Mesa, Arizona)

February 16th-February 19th

We left early Friday morning for Seattle and flew to Phoenix. 

We had no delays and no car rental troubles. 

Our team was in the AM wave so we went to bed early and had to be at the Legacy Sports Complex at 7:15 AM for our first 8 AM game. 

The Legacy Sports Complex was massive---way too massive for one women's bathroom and one refill water station.   Our field house had 45 courts, but there were several field houses, outdoor soccer,  outdoor baseball and softball fields, and a playground. 

It was lovely to walk around outside during the breaks though. 

We made it through this first day undefeated which was an exciting start.  

Joe and Lanae joined us this week-end. 

They were traveling from Las Vegas to visit Emily at college in Tucson and they made the extra stop to watch Harper's group play. 

Volleyball is some long days but they didn't miss one game. 

The moms bought our players the tournament sweatshirts at the end of the day. 

That night we had a team dinner at The Porch in Gilbert. 

Ice-cream after dinner. 

On day 2, we continued with the AM wave of the tournament. 

We won 2 games and lost 1 today. 

That meant that we took 2nd place in our pool and put us in the silver bracket for the final day! 

We got back to our team hotel and some of the girls wanted to swim for a while. 

That evening we drove to Scottsdale (about 35 minutes away from our hotel), and ate outside at the Old Town Tortilla Factory.

Harper was team captain to start off Monday morning. 

They would play today until they A) made the championship or B) lost. 

We weren't sure if it would be a very short day or a long day. 

Turns out we went pretty long--all the way to the semi-final game where we lost in 3 sets!! 

It was such an competitive day of volleyball. 

With Joe and Lanae before they headed to Tucson--they were great volleyball supporters this week-end. 

Some people had flights home tonight but we weren't flying out until Tuesday morning so we drove back to Gilbert and ate at The Culinary Dropout.

We were delayed flying out of Phoenix so we each got a kids snack box on the flight. 

Harper used the Wiki Sticks in the box to entertain herself. 

We stopped for gas and a quick bite to eat and got home about 9. 

And we found out that we placed 15th overall out of 96 total teams in our U14 group.