The Boys Volleyball team has competed in the first game of the season on Wednesday, winning in a “relatively comfortable” match against Pope John with a score of 3-0, according to senior player Kamal Moussa.
The team prepared for the match by “simulating the game environment” by competing against each other in a way that one section of the team was the opponent and the other section was “the starter players”, according to junior Gabriel Madeira. “Basically, [they] just practiced working together in prep for the match”, Madeira says. Although Moussa could not participate in both the practices before the game and the meet due to an injury, he says that the team prepared for the meet by practicing all their basic and advanced plays, since “[they] knew Pope John was going to fight for their game”.
Although the team ended up scoring a victory on Wednesday, there were a couple of issues during the practices before the game, especially in regards to communication. “People were getting frustrated and arguing”, Madeira says, but coach Dan Jurkowski gave the team a pep talk that “got everyone in the mindset to work together” and “stop arguing”. Moussa says that was also a couple of “basic errors” in “[their] routine” and a “slow start”, which resolved on the day of the game.
The game consisted of three sets, and they all went well according to Moussa, who says that team had “a lot of pass-set-hits” and got many “kills”, which are scoring spikes, during the game. To Madeira, he says that “everyone worked well together” and “played [their] game”, and were able to score as many points as they could. Moussa says that one issue in the game was accidentally giving the team points due to “missed serves”, but was “fixed more throughout” on the second and third set. Madeira agrees, saying that something he wishes went differently is that during the first set, the team “could have served the ball better” and “gotten it over rather than costing the team points”.
Some of the returning members got to showcase their talents, according to Moussa and Madeira, examples being seniors Arthur Kossoski, Peter Teixeira Monteiro, and Marcelo Junior, and junior Ryoma Yonetani. Kossoski had “many great passes” and “served big spikes” while Yonetani excelled as a setter, with Monteiro “getting the hardest to get balls” and Junior “shutting down the other team well” and “getting some valuable points”, which includes the point that won the game, along with some “deadly” serves throughout the game.
Using this game as a way to reflect on how the team could improve, Madeira says that the team will work on practicing their serves more, along with substitutions “because [they] kept messing those up”. Moussa says that although the team did well, there is still “much to improve on”, saying that they cannot give “better quality” teams “easy points” like what occured with the missed serves, which is definitely “something to improve on”.
