Volleyball takes one of two matches
The Falcons volleyball team fell to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish on Friday night, winning three sets to nothing, before defeating the Southeastern Louisiana Lions by the same three sets to nothing score.
On Friday, the Falcons fell behind Notre Dame in the first game 25-21, then were not able to recover, falling in the next two sets 25-19 and 25-17, as Notre Dame took the first match of the weekend.
“This was a good team, we knew we had to execute our gameplan and I don’t think we did that,” Falcons head coach Danijela Tomic said. “There were some moments where we played really well, I thought we were patient in some rallies.”
However, the team feels that they were able to get opportunities that they didn’t capitalize on.
“Defensively we did a good job and we had opportunities,” Tomic said. “I think we created opportunities that we didn’t convert into points.”
The team feels that being able to slow down the momentum of the other side while not having the serve will be an important key going forward.
“We have to figure out how to stop teams getting on runs,” Tomic said. “We just didn’t have players who could terminate the ball, but it was hard to do that when we were out of the system a lot.”
Saturday’s game had the team face Southeastern Illinois and the team responded from the previous match’s loss, scoring a convincing 25-15 victory in the first set. The Falcons never looked back, winning 25-17 and 25-12 to seal the sweep of the match as well as take one out of two matches.
“We executed our game plan,” Tomic said. “It’s always nice to bounce back after a loss, we did it last week and we did it tonight, I think we learned some lessons last night and just the efficiency of our hitting was much better, something that we focused on last week in practice was involving our middles more.”
The team feels the main difference between Saturday’s match and Friday’s match was that they took charge early and were able to capitalize on the momentum.
“We set the tone,” Tomic said. “We played at our level and took Southeastern Louisiana out of their system a lot which created more opportunities for us, but I’m just pleased that we were able to bounce back after last night’s loss and finish this weekend on a good note.”
The team will next play on Friday night against the Sacramento State Hornets, then will face a doubleheader against the Seattle Redhawks and Northern Kentucky Norse, all as part of the Northern Kentucky Invitational tournament in Highland Heights, Kentucky.
