Coach Malak, the boys coach, and I had 19 kids to travel with, ten boys and nine girls. One of my players got hurt the day before we left. I was worried about traveling internationally with high school kids but it turned out to be nothing to worry about. These kids travel so much and all over the world they are pros at it. In fact, I think they can tell you exactly where the Starbucks is at every major international airport in the world.
The players and the coaches are hosted by the local team. We lucked out and six of my girls all got to stay at the same HUGE house out in the country and the other three were all together too. I stayed with the high school chemistry/physics teacher named Stephanie; it was her first year in Amman but her third international school to work at. The best part was she had a cat named Chloe and a German Shepard puppy named Jai. So I was very happy to have animals around and she was happy that I liked animals so much, in fact they even slept with me while I was there. Stephanie was very nice and we hit it off pretty well. The school provides them with furnished apartments around the city and also provides them with cars to rent. Her apartment was so nice a new and much bigger than ours, I was jealous.
I was really impressed with Amman and would love to go back and see more of it. It’s in the mountains so has nicer weather than Alexandria and even better it has grass and trees! Although the ground is extremely rocky, I have never seen such rocky ground before. They also have a lot more shopping and almost every American and European brand you would want, unlike Egypt. It felt a little bit more like home. It was also a lot cleaner and nicer, and the city was a lot better organized with nicer architecture. Over all my opinion of Amman was that it is better than Egypt in everyway. Not that I don’t love living in Egypt, but it was nice to be there for awhile. I would have loved to see more, especially the Dead Sea but all our time was consumed with the tournament, it was an exhausting weekend. We did have social events at night for the kids, but unfortunately that meant we just went to another large mall. The kids LOVED it, I hated it. Although, they did have tons of American and European stores, they were designer stores that I couldn’t afford in the States much less when they were marked up prices for Jordan. I couldn’t believe how much our student bought though and how much money they spent. I was surprised that our guys even bought a ton of designer cloths. It’s funny, because at school most of them don’t wear this stuff, they dress like any American high schooler would dress, but when they go out, it’s all designer clothes. I also had to laugh because my girls would get so dressed up in the evenings and do their hair so nice, which they don’t do at school. These international conferences are their way of meeting boys. Of course they don’t like any of the boys at our school since it’s such a small school and they’ve all been together since they were three years old. Plus so many of them are related in some way.
I really enjoyed meeting all the other teachers and coaches and learning about and comparing our schools and countries. It was interesting to see how different they all are. Schutz has a great reputation for being a very good school, but it is also a very small school compared to most others. We also have a good reputation for having very well behaved players and almost always win the Good Sportsmanship aware at every event. However, with such a small school and having a little less than hundred high school students we aren’t always the best in sports since we don’t have a huge population to choose from. In comparison, Doha is almost 98% American students due to the oil company there and they have almost 3,000 students. This year alone they hired 90 new teachers; we only have 36 total teachers. They are so big and rich they can hire professional coaches, rather than have any old teacher coach like the rest of the international schools. Their coach told me she had over 60 girls come try out for the volleyball team. We don’t even have 60 girls in our high school! So needless to say Doha is a little out of everyone else league to compete against.
We played games for three days, the first two we played every team and then got out seed placement for the round robin tournament. Over all I was proud of my girls and could tell that all the hard work we had done had paid off and they had improved a lot this season. However, we did have a few bad games…and I mean bad. We forgot how to play as a team a few times and once they were fighting with each other I got so mad at them I couldn’t even yell at them, I had to have Coach Malak do it. But after a good talking to, and a few pep talks, they pulled it together and played the best game of their life the last set of the tournament. They were very proud of themselves and knew they had done well, we also know which areas to work hardest on next year. We ended up getting fifth place out of six. Which, hey is very good for them! This is the first time these girls having come in last place in volleyball for the last four years. That was my one goal, I didn’t want to get last place again. So I was pretty happy. I think they were even happier than the team that got first place! Our boy’s team got second place. Go Schutz!
Seth enjoyed the time without me it sounds like, he was very social. A lot of the staff when over to Debbie’s (grade 4 teacher) for Canadian Thanksgiving. He said it was fantastic. I guess he did miss me though, because everyone told me he did.
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