By Larissa M. Dagnoni, CC
The International junior volleyball girls’ team played against Cambridge at home on Thursday, and won both sets in decisive fashion.
The lady Griffins started off with a Ciara Harriague serving and quickly moved ahead. Harriague would ultimately have the most serves in the game, many of them aces. And when she wasn’t serving she was hitting spikes to which the Knights were often unable to respond. And when Harriague wasn’t slamming the ball, it seemed that Pamela Suarez was.
The lady Knights were a bit un-prepared for the first set of the game, and didn’t seem to have the experience and calmness that the Griffin girls brought to the game. The Knights were lucky to have Nicole Fermin blocking, and Denise Navallo serving the ball, in order to get as many points as they did. But even though the Cambridge team was doing their best, it wasn’t enough to stop the Griffins, and the first set ended with the Griffins winning 25-13.
When the second set started it seemed that now the Knights were more prepared, and had their heads in the game. They definitely stepped up their game, and the Griffins, who had it easy during the first set, found things getting more complicated in the second set. A great first point scored by Mako Ueno from Cambridge started the set, constant blocks from her teammate Carolina Rea kept the energy and the confidence from the team up.
The game score was really close at the beginning, with the Griffins ahead by a single point at 6-5. It was the Griffins who now seemed to get nervous and who started making mistakes. But the Griffins seemed to finally decide that they did not like the idea that the Knights were gaining on them on their home court, and began to reassert their control of the game.
Harriague started blocking every spike coming from the other side, and her team started to score again. They opened a seven-point lead at 18-11, and eventually won the set and the match 25-14.
Jaguars JV Subdues Eagles in See-Saw Battle
By David Boldt
The Cooperative junior varsity girls volleyball team won an epic three-set match against Christian Learning Thursday afternoon in their home gym.
Christian Learning won the opening set 28-26 in a marathon battle in which the lead seemed to be constantly changing hands, and in which Cooperative’s advantage at the service line was somewhat neutralized by a lack of consistent accuracy.
The deciding point was a Jaguar serve that went straight into the net, something that shouldn’t happen on set point. .
In the second set, two factors seemed to work in favor of the Jaguars and against the Eagles. First, the Eagles seemed to lose focus, and there were frequent breakdowns in communication over who, for instance, was going to field a serve. Second, the Jaguar servers seemed to find the range.
Most of the Cooperative girls hit high-speed overhand serves that were hard to handle when they went in. Christian Learning favored underhand serves that were accurate, but not as challenging to return.
Cooperative took the set easily 25-10.
The Jaguars momentum carried over into the first part of the third set, in which the Jaguars jumped out to a six-point lead, 7-1, and stayed comfortably ahead until the score stood 11-5 in their favor.
At that point the Eagles pulled their socks up, stopped making unforced errors. They also began making more effective use of Emily Mercado, their tallest player, and one of the few players on the court capable of getting above the net and, if not actually spiking the ball, at least tapping it almost directly downward.
Quickly the Eagles brought the score to 12-10, then 12-12, and it appeared to be, as the expression goes, a brand-new ball game.
However, Cooperative serving advantage reasserted itself at that point. Natalia Medina served up three good serves. The last one found an open spot in the Eagle formation and hit the floor untouched, providing a somewhat anticlimactic ending to the struggle.
