Laurel Iversen Young children showing support and making noise during the USA versus China match. Again, first things first.....YES, We beat China tonight 3-0 25-21, 27-25 and 25-22. It was great. Close games, some good rallies and some punishing kills from Destinee from every position on the court. They just could not stop her until a little in the 3rd set. Heather Bown and Foluke both blocked very well. And our young setter, Alisha Glass, just gets better every match.

There was a big, noisy crowd and everybody had their thunder sticks. They are long skinny plastic balloons and when you clap them together they make a lot of noise. Now we are getting some fans and they follow us around and give little gifts to the gals. Lots of photos and the press is everywhere. If we beat Japan tomorrow, we win outright. If we lose we could still win if.....blah blah...We just want to win and be undefeated in this round. Everyone is pumped to win it!

Laurel Iversen Jamie Morrison (left) and Karch Kiraly (right) have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In one of the attached photos you will see two of our assistant coaches, Jamie and Karch, in their excitement over real peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They stay and scout the other matches and we have to find snacks and food for them. There is nothing to eat at the arena, so we bring fruit and bread from the hotel. We bought the PB and J. You can't imagine how good that tastes after 3 1/2 weeks on the road. Overall, the food is not bad, just different. There is a lot of fried foods here in Ningbo, so we are a bit tired of that but some of the dishes are very tasty. There was a great little puff pastry today at lunch with what tasted like sweet pumpkin or a hint of almond paste. I asked our interpreter Yolinda and she told me it was a tropical fruit that smells terrible but tastes very good. I know this from Hawaii, but I can't remember the name...Durian maybe. I told her they were very good and about 15 minutes after lunch she brought a box of 5 or 6 hot ones to my room....nice to have little worker bees around all the time!

There are three young people assigned to our team. Emma is the leader and Yolinda and Scott are her assistants. They are strutting around now in the hotel and the office because USA is winning.

Laurel Iversen China's next generation of volleyball fans, and maybe Chinese National Team players. The other photos are of some kids at the match.

The Haagen Daz was especially good last night. We couldn't decide if we wanted a beer or ice cream so we got both. Not my favorite combo, but it was a celebration of the win over Brazil, so why not! A Brazilian journalist joined us and he said that Brazil's team is not playing as well as they did in the Olympics even though the starters are almost all the same because some of them got silicone breast implants and now they are too heavy. He was half-joking and it was funny how he told it with his accent and limited English. I'm inclined to believe it's because they have a new setter and that can be a gigantic difference in terms of timing and chemistry. It was pretty funny though.

USA is in first place with 10 points. There is a really screwy system of determining the overall winner. You get three points for a match that you win 3-0 or 3-1 and 2 points for a 3-2 win. However, the loser in five sets also gets one point. So right now even though Brazil lost 2 matches they are only 2 points behind us. Two of our wins were 3-2 so we only got 2 pts each time and 3 pts for our 3-0 wins over Italy and China. 10 total. With this system, it is possible for the winner to actually have lost more matches than the another team. We just have to take care of business and beat Japan.

Laurel