Ben Pipes is the captain of the Great Britain men's volleyball team, who have spent this season competing in the Dutch professional league as they look to build a team to compete at London 2012.

The team lost their first 11 matches in the Netherlands before finishing the season with 12 points. Here, Pipes tells BBC Sport about his experiences in the Netherlands and his hopes for the future.

I would not have swapped this experience for the world.

Don't get me wrong. It's been tough and we've been beaten a lot.

You feel like nothing can get worse when you're away from your family and friends, you're training six hours a day every day, and then, at the end of the week, you get beaten again.

And the thing about this league is, the competitiveness is phenomenal. Every team we played, they didn't just want to win, they wanted to hammer us.

But you know someone is paying you respect when they're really trying to beat you.

When we first arrived in Amsterdam, I think they were quite surprised we could play at all. They had this perception that Britain just doesn't play volleyball.

The reality is that we lack consistency and experience, but we've got the talent and the potential to be good players.

As the season has gone on, a lot of people have come up to us and said they're impressed and that the difference they see from week to week is enormous. We've really thrived on that.

For us as a national team aiming for 2012, this was the perfect start to catching up with these countries who have a real volleyball culture.

In Britain, we can train as hard as we like but there is no competitive outlet at the end of it. In the Netherlands, we lived and breathed volleyball: training every day and playing at least one match a week.

Amsterdam is a great city too. It's really lively and it's a clubber's dream - although that's not really my scene. I'm a bit more of a quiet guy.

The club we played for was Club Martinus, who didn't have a sponsor and would have lost their place in the league if the British Volleyball Federation hadn't stepped in. The club arranged our lodgings and kit, while the BVF sorted out the rest.

It was a struggle for us, and we lost our first 11 matches in the league.

The hardest thing has been finding a balance between our high expectations and understanding our limits.

We all expect ourselves to be so much better than we are, and training sessions usually consisted of one or two heated arguments about who's not doing this or who's not putting enough in.

But I think it's the sort of attitude that will get us to 2012.

I'll never forget winning our first game. It was actually against one of the stronger teams, but we tend to do much better against the better teams, which is a trait of an inexperienced side.

That first win was... well, weird. It was a bit of an anti-climax if I'm honest. You build it up, then when it happened, everyone was really happy but it was more like relief.

No one really felt like jumping up and down. We just went to the bar and had a quiet drink. It was just a nice sense of achievement in making that first step forward.

I think if you look at how far we've come in a year, if that acceleration continues then we'll more than easily be at a competitive level by 2012.

And the one thing you can't factor in is what a home Olympics means. It doesn't matter who you put us against, or the difference in level, the home crowd factor will make such a difference.

As a nation, we're the sort of people who step up to the challenge. It's within all of us now, and all of the people that come into the programme, to stand up when we need to be counted and I think that will be at the Olympics in 2012.

Ben Pipes was speaking to Caroline Cheese. Pipes is among the British athletes who BBC Sport will be following during the countdown to London 2012.