Brazil in the springtime is beautiful, let alone getting a chance to play the current No. 1-ranked team in the world 5 times in 8 days. As a team, we arrived in Montes Claros, Brazil on Sunday afternoon after about 24 hours of traveling. We arrived in Belo Horizonte and there we waited for Brazil’s Men’s National Team to join us, and the two of us took a chartered plane to Montes Claros, Brazil. The plane ride was one the hottest instances of my life, and I’m from Phoenix. I could go out on a limb and speak for every person on the team including the Brazil’s entire team. It’s true, hot air does rise and the twin prop plane we were in reached that hottest point. Not only were we tired from traveling, we were dripping sweat. Brazil’s team resorted to taking off their shirts to try and cool off.

As we arrived in Montes Claros, the first question asked of Coach Alan Knipe and those that spoke to media was, “How’s your team going to deal with this heat?” The answers were pretty obvious of course. Mother Earth seemed to have a say in most things so far on the trip. For example, Monday night we had a full scheduled practice and about an hour and a half into practice the rain started coming and it kept coming and even came onto the court. The roof was leaking in a few spots and drops of rain were coming on the court. As frantically as Aaron Brock and I were getting towels, we were no match for Mother Nature.

We were playing in a newly remodeled arena that from what locals said was one of the first things built in the city. In anticipation for our match, they spent the last three weeks working tirelessly on getting the inside a facelift. They pulled it off; it looked great by game time!

With this being my first (Olympic) quad and stint with the U.S. Men’s National Team, I was extremely eager for a chance to play Brazil. I had seen them play this summer in the World League Final Round in Serbia, but was chomping at the bit to be a part of my first USA vs. Brazil match.

Before the match, some of the guys were talking about playing Brazil during the last quad. We came up with the number 7. Seven being the number of times USA played Brazil ALL last quad. Tonight kicked off the start of 5 matches with them; that’s nearly as many times as we played them the past 4 years. It’s a pretty awesome experience for everyone to be able to play such good competition besides our own.

We brought a fairly young squad with a handful of veterans like Tom Hoff, Riley Salmon, Rich Lambourne, and Scott Touzinsky who have all been a part of success against Brazil. That core mixed with younger, eager guys like Jonathan Winder, Russell Holmes, Paul Lotman who haven’t experienced much international play were excited to get a chance to prove themselves a bit.

Brazil was playing with a younger squad, most notably, Giba (OH), Sergio (L), and Bruno (S) weren’t playing but there with the team.

Set 1, USA and Brazil exchanged some heavy blows back and forth… and a lot of service errors. Finally we were able to get a couple stops on our side thanks to some really nice net play by Russell Holmes and start to pull away. Ultimately, we took Set 1, 25-23.

Sets 2, 3 and 4 were all pretty similar. We were able to side out at a fairly high rate, but service errors and them out blocking us 9-3 was where the match was won and lost. We ended up losing 3-1 in favor of Brazil.

The beautiful thing is we get to do this 4 more times and I’m confident the outcome will be different, that’s something within our power. Mother Nature, now that’s a whole different story. Who knows, we might get rained out!  

-Chris Jackson-