Yarmouth proved themselves the veteran team on Thursday night, Oct. 22, when they swept the visiting Scots from the playoffs in straight sets, 25-6, 25-14 and 25-11.
“The big difference was, I think, we’ve never been in the playoffs before,” said Bonny Eagle head coach Kelley Champagne. “So my guess is the girls started a little tense, a little tight.”
Champagne pointed specifically to her squad’s serve-receive as a problem. “Everything else was going pretty good, but without a serve-receive, there’s not much you can do,” she said, buoyant despite the defeat.
“They were slow to move,” Champagne said. “They didn’t move their feet to the ball. They were kind of, ‘You get it, you get it’ – timid, instead of stepping forward. No one really took charge of the serve-receive.”
It’s Bonny Eagle’s first year on the varsity circuit. To reach the postseason at such an early stage of a program’s development is an impressive achievement, and Champagne was understandably proud.
“Excellent,” she said of the season as a whole. “I couldn’t ask for more. And we were the only one of the new teams to make it into the playoffs.”
Regardless of their lackluster serve-receive, a number of Scots played well in other areas of their last bout of the season, earning Champagne’s praise.
“We had a lot of hustle out of our setter: Bailey [Gryskwicz] never gave up…We even pulled her back. Our middle hitter, Katie [Champagne] was calling, moving around. [She] had a great game. We were lucky to have Whitney Regan come in, she’s a sophomore; we pulled her up from JV to pull in some serves, and she probably got three aces for us, so she was kind of our diamond in the rough.”
Bonny Eagle entered the tournament ranked ninth, at 10-4; they retire till 2016 at 10-5.
Bonny Eagle’s Breanna Lifland sends a ball back toward the net and her Yarmouth opponents on Thursday night.Send questions/comments to the editors.
