The Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) Elecs junior girls volleyball team finished second at their home tournament on Saturday, but the improvements they showed on the court had their coach excited about the result.
“The majority of the team is Grade 9 (athletes), so a lot of them haven’t had a whole lot of volleyball experience at all and this is their first taste of team play in this setting and these systems,” said Elecs bench boss Ceanna Lindquist. “Two weeks ago they didn’t even know what rotation was and what positions there were, so they have learned a lot. And for them to put it together and be in a gold-medal match, that’s a victory for us for sure.”
The gold-medal game featured the Elecs facing the Arcola School Panthers, which is a junior/senior team that ran roughshod over the competition in the tournament round robin only losing one set of eight played. The Panthers jumped ahead 4-0 over the Elecs early in the first set of the final due to a variety of defensive miscues by the home side, but ECS got back into the game on their following serve with Abby Hanson rattling off four straight points.
The game went back-and-forth from there with the Elecs slowly building a lead that was capped off with a kill by Mackenzie Skuce to put the Blue and Red up 20-13. ECS kept up the pressure after that and scored the winning point in the 25-20 set on a spike at the net by Julia Klatt off a volley by Hanson.
The Panthers dominated the second set with Christie McNeil and Shae Johnston being particularly effective with their serve scoring a number of aces. Panthers’ Bailey Cutler notched the winning point in the 25-12 win with a shot from the corner of the net that found onside space just inside the foul lines.
The Elecs brushed off the loss in the third and deciding set jumping ahead 3-0 on Hanson’s serve and heading into the middle of the frame up 8-3. The Panthers clawed back from that point eventually tying the match 10-10 on a McKenna Harkness spike that dropped into the middle of the court before claiming the title with a 15-11 win.
“Well they pulled it out of their butts, if I can say that,” said Panther head coach Laurie James, about how the team managed the comeback in the final set. “They had to realize that they had to hit the ball. All tournament I’ve been telling them they had to hit the ball, so once they started hitting the ball they started winning.”
Lindquist said the Elecs’ home tourney was their second action of the season having played in a Carlyle/Arcola/Manor competition the previous weekend where they finished sixth out of 15 teams. She said their next action is Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 when the team will play in a Moose Jaw tournament with the hope that their early gains will help them compete with the city teams.
“There is a lot more challenges, a lot more in system play and different things we might not see at this level,” said Lindquist. “I’m really excited. We have two weeks to practise, so we’re really looking forward to developing our systems.”
