Dan Falloon
The 2009-10 edition of the Muskies senior girls’ volleyball team has been a bit of an enigma for head coach Duane Roen.
The black-and-gold seem firmly entrenched in their second-place perch in NorWOSSA this season at 2-3, having been bounced handily by the powerhouse Dryden Eagles in all three of their match-ups but taking both from the Kenora Broncos so far.
A home date with Dryden looms after the exam break, as do two trips to Kenora before the playoffs.
“We’re not where I want us to be at this point, but we’re slowly progressing,” admitted Roen. “Some of the Grade 11 kids are starting to step up and figure out the speed of the senior level and are getting better.
“At this point in the season, I wanted us to be a little further ahead, so this last third of the season they’re going to have to work a lot harder if they’re going to be successful at NorWOSSA,” he stressed.
Roen noted the key area of improvement for his charges is just to execute a little more quickly.
“We have to be faster,” he said bluntly. “The kids have to move their feet instead of just sticking their arms out.
“I’ve been going over that with them for the last two weeks. I’m hoping that it’s going to sink in, and when it does, we’re going to start playing better.”
Roen contrasted the senior girls with the junior boys’ squad he coached earlier in the school year.
The boys romped to an 8-0 regular-season record, and while they were upset by Dryden in the NorWOSSA final, the magical run was due, in large part, to their willingness to pound the ball.
“It was part of that aggressiveness, the real hunger to hit the ball, to play hard, and I’m still waiting for that from some of these girls,” Roen said.
“I know it’s there, I just haven’t seen it yet.
“Little bits and pieces here and there, just not consistently throughout the game,” he bemoaned.
Another asset Roen said is being under-utilized is the Muskies’ height advantage over both the Eagles and Broncos, which could end up being a major strength against Dryden’s vaunted attack.
“One of the things we’ve been trying to do is work on our blocking because we do have some fairly tall girls,” he noted. “Across the league, we have some of the tallest players, so we’re hoping to be able to use that to our advantage later in the season.”
Despite a few blemishes, Roen also is able to see the positives in the team this year, especially when it comes to his younger players picking up set plays at the higher tier.
“We’re running plays, which is what you want to do at the senior level,” he explained. “We have seven plays under our belt, and we’re consistently running four of them.
“When we run the plays more often, it makes the game more exciting for everybody.
“The newer kids, especially, they’re really starting to pick it up and they’re starting to enjoy this different part of the game,” Roen added.
“In junior, you don’t get into too many plays, so they’re eating that up and they’re enjoying that part.”
Roen also was generally pleased with his players on an individual level, but the talents haven’t quite melded into a coherent unit quite yet, which has frustrated him.
“There’s a lot of good stuff there, but it’s just a team that we have to build,” he stressed. “It’s just got to be something that happens all the time.
“And when it does, I think it’s going to be a very strong team. It’s just getting the team chemistry down.”
Roen suspects a lack of confidence at times has been a culprit in the team’s under-achieving play, and it’s up to the players themselves to find the belief in their own skills.
“I don’t know if they’re shy or if they get down on themselves, or what,” Roen conceded. “It’s got to be the point where they have the confidence because, as coaches, we have confidence in them.
“They have to come together as a team and have confidence in their abilities, and when they do, they’ll perform well.”
When the team does jell, there’s still the matter of getting past Dryden, which Roen knows will be a formidable task.
“The hard part about Dryden is trying to find their weakness because they’re a very strong team,” he noted.
“They play club, they play all year round, and it shows. They train in the off-season, and they swing hard.
“The thing about Dryden is they make very few mistakes.”
The black-and-gold visit Kenora on Feb. 4 and 11, and host Dryden on Feb. 9.
