It's always good for a team's confidence to acknowledge good play and take responsibility for earning some decent wins against some decent teams, i.e. our wins vs. Germany and Georgia this week in China. And I'm totally on board with that concept, and I certainly can recognize our solid play in general for the tournament. However, I must admit, that I feel like we had a smidgeon of luck thrown into the mix.

I have my reasons, so listen up. You see, a number of American and European teams decided to skip the Shanghai Open, leaving the door open for us to sneak into the main draw without having to play in the qualifier. On top of that, we faced three match points versus the Russians (which on one they had a swing for the match) which would have eliminated us at 25th, but somehow we managed to sneak away with the win, and go on to a 9th place finish. Fairly lucky, don’t you think?

Well, for those of you who are still skeptical, I've saved the best for last. Here's the clincher: FIVB has awarded the wildcard into the main draw of the Prague Open to.... Heese/Cadieux! Convinced yet?

Don't worry, I'm not chalking it all up to luck. In fact, there's a big part of me that knows we've earned every single thing that comes our way. But I just want to be sure that we don't rest on our laurels, so talking about being lucky is just my way of making sure we stay tough and are ready to compete well the next time that we don't feel so lucky.