Korea Trip Update #1

Hello everyone,

Here is an update of the first couple days of our trip to South Korea.

Our trip started Monday morning at 9am as all the T-birds gathered at the Vancouver international airport for our 12pm direct flight to Korea. The 16 players

travelling to Korea include
Setters: Ryan Zwarich, Chris Klassen
Wing spikers: Demijan Savija, Nate Schuck, Robert Bennett, Ben Chow, Garrett Lavalley, Milo Warren, Rex Fenton, Tanner Kozak
Middle Blockers: Yari Kozel, Joe Cordonier, Jeff Ross, Cary Brett
Liberos: Blair Bann, Ian Perry

Everybody strolled in on time looking fresh in our new UBC golf shirts and other travel attire. With a lot of time to spare before our flight took off we all exchanged some Canadian dollars into Korean Won which works out to about 1$ Can = 1000 won. After a few hours of lounging around the airport and picking up some 12 hour flight essentials it was finally time to get going. The flight went by surprisingly fast since the Air Canada flight had the on demand televisions with an amazing selection of new movies and TV shows. We arrived safely in Seoul around 3:30pm Tuesday morning and headed on a bus to our hotel. By this time some guys were starting to pass out on the bus but the excitement of being in Korea kept many of us awake. Once we got to our hotel we were all pretty amazed. It’s called “Hotel Castle” and for a good reason. We explored the area of our hotel for about an hour after dinner. As a big group of guys who are pretty tall especially in this country so we do stand out quite a bit and are noticed by pretty much everyone walking around. Everybody started to crash pretty early including my roomie “young swol” aka Ben Chow and I since we wanted to be fully rested to start with a good first training session the next morning at 10am.
We woke up and had breakfast which was comprised of some Korean food and some western food. Nonetheless it was pretty good and we were off to our first session at SKK University. Our Itinerary for the day included a 10 am weight training session and then a 4pm practice. We got to the campus and it pretty much looked like a sports school. The volleyball, basketball and baseball team were all training and what I think was the soccer team was using the weight room. Our first practice we ended up sharing the weight room with some Korean soccer players. It was a pretty cool experience just watching what they would do in the gym in comparison to us. The main differences noticed was that many of the exercises they do involve using a partner who is actively involved. For example, a partner will add increased resistance or somehow add difficulty to the exercises. They also do pretty much everything with maximum speed and a lot of reps.
Our afternoon practice started off with lots of excitement but also some difficulties. Firstly, the gym is the hottest environment I think most of us have ever played in and you almost have to change your shirt after warm up because the amount of sweating that is going on. Also they use a different ball than we do in Canada so it will take some time to get used to. We trained for two and half hours but the time simply flew by and everybody is very eager to get back to SKK campus and start training again.
We go twice again tomorrow with an on court session at 10am and than an exhibition scrimmage with the SKK team. Stay tuned to find out how it goes!

Thanks for reading
-Team VolleyHype