Dan Falloon
Attaining perfection is much easier said than done.
After Muskie senior girls’ volleyball coach Duane Roen acknowledged his team was going to have to play the matches of their lives to capture NorWOSSA gold last Friday in Dryden, it’s fair to say the uphill climb stalled in the final against the host Eagles.
“The girls knew they had to show up there and play their absolute best if they wanted to have a run at it, and it just didn’t turn out that way,” Roen explained.
“The result, of course, is what happens when you don’t.”
Fort High dropped three quick sets to the Eagles in the best-of-five final, falling 25-12, 25-14, and 25-9 to settle for the silver medal.
Dryden put up four-straight points to start the match and really set the tone from there—rarely giving the black-and-gold a sniff of the lead.
The Muskies battled through unforced errors, both while serving and receiving, hitting far too many balls into the net or out-of-bounds to be successful.
“If you were to run the error ratio from one team to another, the better team won, for sure,” Roen conceded.
The veteran coach connected the dots between the errors and the attempts to be flawless since many of the mistakes were spawned from the pressure to be perfect.
“When players are trying their absolute hardest, they get tensed up. And when your body’s tense in the game of volleyball, where you have to absorb a little bit of the ball,” Roen observed.
“I’ve noticed the kids shanking the ball quite a bit more, or not making those key passes that they need to, which really frustrates them.”
Aside from the noticeable muscle tension the squad displayed, the plays were textbook examples of execution—and would have been run to perfection in training.
“A lot of the passes, there, their body position was perfect and the balls were shanking. It had to be how tense they were in the pass,” Roen said.
“You’re in front of a crowd and it’s webcast, so I’m sure lots of parents were watching, so I’m sure that was in the back of their mind, too.”
The Muskies called the majority of the time-outs during the gold-medal match, and Roen noted a fair number of those had nothing to do with strategy.
The black-and-gold tended to respond to the break in the action and calmed down, but generally only caught the lightning in a bottle for a point or two before Dryden hopped back into the driver’s seat.
“A few of the time-outs were just to relax and just enjoy it,” Roen recalled. “When you play that way, you play much better because you are relaxed and things come naturally.
“They have the natural skill to do what I ask them to do, but sometimes the stress takes over, and the tension, and then they get frustrated.
“Part of the reason you get frustrated, too, is when you know you’re better than the way you’re playing in the biggest game of the year,” he added.
Fort High had advanced to the final by sweeping the Kenora Broncos 3-0 in the semi-final earlier Friday, and the Muskies largely used their starters.
But in the final later on, Roen was forced to play chemist on the sidelines—rotating in his bench players in the hope of finding six girls who were all clicking at once.
Unfortunately, the ideal combination proved elusive.
“I put every girl out there in that gold-medal game,” Roen stressed. “It didn’t matter who it was, it just wasn’t making that difference.”
On several occasions, the Eagles’ attack seemed to be running like clockwork as the setter often put up an ideal ball for the Dryden hitters, who drilled shots right onto the Muskie court.
“Their court sense and their movement and the arm swing is just more advanced, and you could see that,” lauded Roen, who noted several Eagles play on a club team and have received much more volleyball training than the Muskies.
But Roen also picked out a few weaknesses from the Dryden juggernaut, catching a break when one of the higher-flying Eagles struggled at various points in the game.
“They made some errors, too, though,” he noted. “Their No. 12 hitter [Meryl Smith] wasn’t her usual hard-hitting self.
“She missed a lot of her serves, and that was one of the tougher serves for us to get up and that wasn’t an issue that day.
“[But] their other players stepped up and ours didn’t,” he remarked.
Roen also felt Dryden had a home-court advantage that was accounted for by its fans, but by the travel, as well. While both the Broncos and Muskies were forced into an early morning, the Eagles were able to keep their normal schedule and also weren’t forced to warm up and cool down twice.
With roughly seven hours between Fort High’s semi-final win and the championship loss, it was difficult for the black-and-gold to retain any momentum from the morning.
“The kids were up at 5 a.m. and sat around there all day long,” noted Roen. “That has an impact, for sure.
“It was kind of a hot and cold,” he added. “We’d rack up six or seven points and Kenora would come back and get two or three, maybe four.”
But even after the bitterly disappointing loss in the finals Roen all in all was pleased with how the season went, especially in relation to where the team measured up against tough competition from teams in Thunder Bay.
“We had a lot of really good games this year. We were able to take sets away from every team in Thunder Bay, and we were able to take sets away from every team we played this year, even Dryden,” Roen recalled.
“There are very few teams in the league, in this area, that have been able to do that.”
Looking ahead to next year, Roen hoped the returning players motivate themselves to get a head start on the season.
“It would be nice if those girls put together a pre-season workout for next fall to get them a little stronger,” he hinted.
“It would certainly make their game a lot better,” he stressed.
