Match vs Bison's

Strike is still on.  So Becky gets her first official head-coaching debut.  We played the Manitoba Bison's another team basically in the same situation as us.  It has become a good rivalry for both programs.  David Larkins from the Winnipeg sun wrote about it and can be read at http://bit.ly/tXlIE5 

We put together a strong game plan and the coaches felt the team was ready to perform.  We started Kellie, Claire, Jaryn, Tori, Meaghan, Larissa, and Chloe at libs.  The team came out firing on all cylinders.  We served tough and put them in trouble, which kept the ball out of their National Team member Tricia Mayba’s hands.  We won the first set 25-16.

The Bison’s are a well coached team and Ken made a couple of adjustments to their defense and was able to make us continue a lot of balls.  We fell behind early, but with some strong offense from Meaghan and Jaryn, we were ahead near the end.  We then used a double sub which all pre-season worked wonders for us.  But this time unfortunately it didn’t, five errors in a row from our side found us down 22-21.  We switched back and the team battled losing 25-23.  Jenna and Brianna coming in for the double sub weren’t the reason for the errors.  Just an untimely passing breakdown and a few poor hitting choices were more the reason

The next set was close all the way with Tricia and Kristy Hunter finding their groove. The Bison’s won 25-22. Our defense needed to improve if we had any hope of coming back in this match. Becky and Ashley decided to go with our smaller lineup.  Moving Tori to right and Chloe swinging.  Chloe accepted the challenge and had 7 kills in the set.  Lindsay came in as libs and touched a lot of shots defensively.  We were in a ball control war.  It was full of long rallies.  As the game got closer to the end we started to serve easier which allowed Tricia to get more swings.  When the match gets closer we need to trust our selves in what we worked on.  We ended up losing 31-29 in the set.  We had three swings to send it to a fifth set.

Jaryn ended up with 18 kills and was a tremendous leader throughout the match.  Meaghan had 13 kills and we feel that she needs to get more opportunities, she should match Tricia’s volume and Meaghan showed she can match up with one of our National team players shot for shot.

The box score can be seen http://bit.ly/uFZExd

So what did we learn?

1.     We need to teach the middles how to think a bit more when it comes to blocking.  There were some obvious patterns that emerged late in the match which can help us.

2.     We need to serve tougher all the way through the match and follow serving plans.

3.     Defend better, we over read situations and were out of our positions. Trust that each of us will fulfill our defensive resposibilities.

4.     Set Meaghan in transition more. Then find away to use our stronger attackers on their weaker blockers.