Lady Knights serve a close loss
Published 9:46 pm Tuesday, September 2, 2014
The Suffolk Christian Academy girls’ volleyball team’s most recent match last week against host Greenbrier Christian Academy was a good illustration of the frustrating place the promising team finds itself in.
“We lost three straight (sets), but again it was back and forth, up and down, close, all the way to the end,” Lady Knights coach Kristy Patton said. “It seems to be the theme of the season thus far.”
The Lady Gators prevailed 25-20, 25-21, 25-20.
Suffolk Christian Academy sophomore Julia Powell practices her serve as a long line of girls await to do the same during practice on Tuesday at the Liberty Outreach Center.
“Greenbrier’s strength was consistency,” Patton said. “They attacked strong, and they were fairly consistent with passing and service.”
Meanwhile, SCA lacks consistency, and the coach affirmed the problem is due, in large part, to the youth and inexperience on the roster. The team’s starting lineup includes four returning players, but it is dominated by underclassmen, with four sophomores.
Patton said that against the Lady Gators, her players’ service was kind of erratic, and they could not put all the pieces together on offense.
“We made attacks, we just couldn’t finish them, we couldn’t put them away,” she said.
Suffolk Christian mustered only five kills during the contest, but the team had a couple standout players, even in the loss.
The coach said senior Zoe Waddell came off the bench and played well.
“She took last year off, so it was kind of her comeback moment,” Patton said.
Freshman Miriam Farmer accounted for three of its five kills and had the most service points.
The Lady Knights have road matches on Thursday and Friday, and Patton listed some things she plans to have the girls work on in preparation for those contests.
“One really big point will be service,” she said. Another one will be aggressive attacks. “We’re just being too careful.”
This carefulness translates into tentativeness, which stunts the strength of an attack. Patton said she needs to change her players’ mentality, which, in some ways, is a task much more difficult than dealing with players’ physicality.
She will look to continue physical conditioning, to help prepare them for those last five minutes of a match, when they need to have the endurance to close out an opponent.
Patton also said she needs the Lady Knights to become more acclimated to high-pressure situations in a match. She said she aims to “put some pressure on them in practice, so when they step back there in the game, it’s not a new thing.”
Suffolk Christian (0-3, 0-2) visits Southampton Academy on Thursday evening and visits Oaktree Academy on Friday evening.
