Hi my name is Andrew Sato and also with me today is Matt Tarantino.

There hasn't been a blog for a few days because our schedule here in Argentina has been just crazy. Pretty much where it's been left off is up until our match against Egypt on August 19th. We can basically describe the match as an “unnecessary marathon,” but it helped us learn how to battle and become victorious. After a long bus ride back to our hotel we had dinner and went to bed content with our victory.

We woke up yesterday morning (August 20th) to eat breakfast. Most of the team went back to their rooms and napped to rest up for our match later that night against Bulgaria. We ate lunch at 2 p.m. and afterwards had a film session at 2:30 p.m. to watch the scouting report and understand the game plan put together by our coaches. We then headed back up to our rooms to get our stuff ready for departure to the match. We were supposed to be on the bus and leave at 3:30 p.m., but a very traumatic and unfortunate event occurred, delaying our departure.

 As a victim of the incident (Andrew Sato) I will describe what went on right before we left for the match. Myself and several other teammates (Ben Patch, Scott Rhein, Austin Kingi, and Josh Kirchner) got stuck in the elevator while on our way down to the lobby... The five of us were at the lobby floor and the doors began to slowly open, but Scott Rhein decided to try and pry the doors open because the doors can be pulled opened really easily, but then the doors closed on us and we just sat there for a solid two minutes trying to figure out what was going on. Then Scott opens to doors again to see what's going on and it is just dark and there is a brick wall right in front of us. At that point we were all like, "Oh. No."

Meanwhile, the rest of the team was just chillin' on the bus waiting for us five to show up. We quickly pushed the emergency button in the elevator to signal whoever to come save us. We got no response though so we began yelling. At this point some members of the trapped group began freaking out (Ben Patch). Ben Patch frantically jumped from several different scenarios; from imagining a scene from the movie Final Destination where we would poke our head out and then it would get stuck and become decapitated, to it becoming the Tower of Terror ride and us falling to our deaths (even though we were on the ground...), to us running out of oxygen and suffocating, to us being trapped so long that we would get hungry and have to eat one another.

Well, thank god we were only trapped for a good 15 minutes before somebody was able to restart the elevator and rescue us. We quickly jumped on the bus at about 3:45 p.m. and headed off to our match.

We arrived a little early to the arena for our 6:00 p.m. match and used the time to get a good extra warm up in. Before we knew it, though the match was underway. Unfortunately, the match did not go as planned and we lost in four sets. We were all very frustrated after the match because we did not bring our best performance, making far too many errors throughout the match, and we didn't show them our true playing abilities. We got back to the hotel and ate dinner and then had a film session at about 11 p.m. to watch what we could have changed and done better so hopefully we don't make the same mistakes in our next match on August 21st against the host country Argentina since we know this is going to be a HUGE match for us. It decides whether we move on to the top 8 or not.

Well wish us good luck and hopefully we can rise up to the challenge!

-Andrew Sato & Matt Tarantino