Dan Falloon
Heading into the NorWOSSA playoffs this Friday (Feb. 19) in Dryden, the Muskie junior girls’ volleyball team’s biggest challenge is realizing the first set actually counts.
The black-and-gold, who finished the regular season in second place with a 3-5 record, won the first set only twice in eight tries and Muskie coach Jason Cain knows building a lead is key if Fort High hopes to challenge for the league crown.
“Too often, they’re not playing their best. They wait too long to actually start playing and they’ve got to do it right off the hop,” Cain stressed.
“They’ll let someone take the first set, and even in tournament situations, too, they’ll let someone take the first set, and then go and pummel them the next,” he noted.
The last two times Fort High dropped the opening set in the regular season, they fought back to win the best-of-five match. Both of those occasions were in wins over the Kenora Broncos, who they’ll face in the semi-final round on Friday.
“I’m just trying to encourage them,” Cain said of his team. “I think just keeping it positive will get them going.
“When it gets to crunch time, they will put the extra effort in,” he remarked.
Fort High finished with a 2-2 record against Kenora during the regular season—dropping the two matches played here early in the season before rebounding with a pair of victories in hostile territory on Feb. 4 and 11.
Cain said the Muskies have been able to adapt well to Kenora’s attack in the recent matches, but he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the Broncos will show some new looks in Friday’s do-or-die showdown for a berth in the NorWOSSA final against the first-place Dryden Eagles.
“Kenora is a tipping team. They tip a lot and they don’t hit very often, or at least they haven’t yet,” Cain remarked.
“They could always change, they might be holding back,” he acknowledged.
“As long as we have our tip coverage ready to go, we should do extremely well against them,” Cain added.
“We kind of know exactly where they’re going to put the ball every time and, once in a while, they can be a little tricky, but they’re pretty consistent putting the ball in the same spot every time.”
If the black-and-gold emerge from the semi-final, they’ll face the Eagles, who represent a 180-degree turnaround from the Broncos, said Cain.
“They serve extremely hard and they hit hard,” he lauded. “There’s one girl on their team that if we can shut her down, we can probably shut down most of their offence.
“We’ll have to double-block her everywhere she goes,” Cain explained. “When she’s in the front row, they start getting points on us. But when she moves to the back row, we start getting some points.
“If we can shut her down when she’s in front, we can start to roll with some points,” he reasoned.
Another key point for the Muskies on Friday, if they make it to the championship, is to make sure they stay within striking distance of the Eagles given Dryden’s confidence explodes when they’re able to reel off a string of points.
“If you give them a four- or a five-point lead, they tend to run with it and it’s hard to keep up, especially when you’re just going point-for-point,” noted Cain.
Fort High came back from two sets down to upset Dryden 3-2 back on Jan. 5, and Cain recalled the Eagles buckled from being challenged for the first time all season.
“It was probably the first time all season that they’d been in a pressure situation,” said Cain. “They were scrambling a bit when we were playing one of our strongest games.
“If we get in a situation where we can put some pressure on them, we can do well,” he added.
“Once they do get behind, or when they realize that they might lose a set, they do start making some mistakes and we’ve just got to capitalize on that,” he stressed.
