Dan Falloon
Fort High senior girls’ volleyball coach Duane Roen was blunt about what his squad had to do to mount a serious challenge at Friday’s NorWOSSA playoffs in Dryden.
“We can’t make any mistakes,” he remarked.
Roen has observed night-and-day differences even among sets as recently as the regular-season finale last Thursday (Feb. 11) against the Kenora Broncos, who provide the Muskies’ semi-final opponent for the right to vie for NorWOSSA gold against the host Eagles.
“Our first game against Kenora, we were serving about 60 percent and we lost that set,” noted Roen. “I put a different crew of girls in for the second [set] and we only missed two serves the entire game and we won 25-11.
“I kept them in for the next set and we won 25-13, and there was only three missed serves.”
The Muskies eventually won the best-of-five match 3-1.
Roen said to combat the team’s serving struggles, he’s trying to get his troops to simplify the attack.
“It’s good to be aggressive in the serving,” he noted. “I always try to talk to them about technique first and power later, and we had to have a little chat about making sure we’re doing our technical game well.
“It’s very telling when you don’t get your serves in how detrimental that is to the game,” he stressed.
The veteran coach also said the Muskies have to be cautious when returning the ball as the black-and-gold haven’t been making opponents work for their points as often as they should.
“The other thing we have to be careful on is making sure we keep it in-bounds,” Roen said. “We’ve been hitting a lot of balls out-of-bounds and basically the other team was just watching and winning.
“I said, ‘Take a little bit of power off your hits and keep the ball in, and we played really well because it was up to Kenora, then, to start making the mistakes,” he reasoned.
Roen did say team practices have been running like clockwork, but there just seems to be a wrench here and there thrown into the matches.
“That’s been frustrating because you run practice, and everything was working fine in practice, and then it comes into the game,” he remarked.
“Whether they jump a little too soon or a little too late, or they’re not squaring their shoulders, and basically, the other team just stands there and watches.”
Roen predicted that if the Muskies are able to transfer what they do in practice into a game situation, they should be able to get by Kenora and into the league final with Dryden on Friday.
“As long as we keep that philosophy this week, and make our way through Kenora, which I’m assuming we should be able to do if we play well, then up against Dryden—we’ve come close to them a couple times, we took a set off of them in Thunder Bay—it’s possible, we just have to not make any mistakes,” he stressed.
“Be smart, put the ball where they’re not, and make those girls move.”
The best strategy for challenging the Eagles seems to be trying to keep them guessing and running different offensive attacks, instead of launching a handful of charges.
“One thing Dryden doesn’t do very well is when you attack them on the second ball, instead of bump, set, hit, you bump and attack,” he noted.
“We keep them moving, we try to do things that they’re not expecting.
“Instead of just pounding the ball every time, you have to be able to attack the ball well,” he stressed.
Still, Roen conceded the Eagles are shored up defensively, so only a near-flawless game will bring a NorWOSSA crown to Fort Frances.
“They play really well in the defensive part, as well. They move themselves around and get to where they need to be,” he lauded.
“All we need to do is get them off that, make them second-guess where they should be standing and read a tougher play.”
The Muskies should expect Eagles’ fans to bring the noise if the two squads do end up tangling on Friday, and Roen is doing his best to make sure his team can handle it.
“It’ll be loud. Volleyball’s big in Dryden,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll bring a stereo in and crank some music and make them talk over it so they get an idea of how loud it’s going to be.”
But Roen said that like Canadian Olympic athletes competing in Vancouver right now, hosting competitions could bring about more pressure than fan support can alleviate.
“Dryden will be under the pressure, as well, because everybody has high expectations of them, and we’ll be the underdog for sure, to take some of that pressure off,” he argued.
“You have the advantage of the crowd, but you also have that underlying expectation.”
