Volleyball Tournament Pushes Through Troubles

Buffalo High School’s traditional volleyball tournament finished after the large bracket created trouble along the way.

After the Friday night lights on the field dimmed, the night remained young for Buffalo High School students on Friday night. After the exciting homecoming game, students made their way into the school to participate in Fun Night. The iconic volleyball tournament is a tradition of Fun Night that many students participate in. However, the tournament was much larger this year. More teams signed up than ever before. The usual tournament features 20 teams. This year, though, 33 teams played. The decision to follow through with the larger bracket caused problems to arise along the way. This included teams dropping out, a longer tournament than usual, and less student attendance.

With the larger number of teams participating, there was an effort to play shorter matches to speed things up, but it didn’t work out in the end. At midnight, the tournament was cut short, and the final matches were postponed until Wednesday during base. 

The shift to a 2-day tournament caused multiple cracks in the event. There were instances of teams dropping out of the tournament, not wanting to come back for another day. The winning team (CDLD) even lost their team captain for the second half of the tournament.

The event is managed by Science Teacher Amber Sedbrook.

“I would say trying to figure out how to get all of the teams to play within the time frame and still ending by midnight is the hardest part of it all,” said Sedbrook. “When you consider that there are like eight players per team, with most teams having one or two coaches. Even if it’s just eight people per team, you’re talking 250 people. It’s definitely a lot more to coordinate, just like supervision-wise…”

The intense tournament concluded with 32 matches played over two days. Team CDLD had their exciting victory after going undefeated in 5 games.