By Meghan Foley
Hometown Weekly Staff
This week, the girls’ volleyball team will be playing their first matches of the season. However, one of their scrimmages last week had them back up against the Joseph Case Cardinals.
Last year, the Warriors had a regular season record of 16–4 and made it to the semifinals as the 2nd seed, where they fell to 3rd-seeded Joseph Case (18–2). The Cardinals were then defeated by 1st-seeded Bellingham in the finals.
Although the scrimmage doesn’t count towards their record, beating the team that knocked them out last year is an exciting accomplishment just ahead of the official season. The Warriors defeated the Cardinals in a close 3–2 match with set scores of 25–22, 25–22, 24–26, 9–25, and 15–11.
“We definitely wanted to work on…just playing our game,” said Head Coach Arthur Felicio after the match. “Playing clean volleyball—we had a jamboree on Saturday, it was a long day, and first day of school today, you know, a lot of factors can affect today’s game, but, you know, I think we did a great job at just playing our game—except for that fourth set, you know, stuff happened—but bouncing back in that fifth set, turning it around. I told them like, ‘hey, that fourth set, it didn’t happen, alright? We need to go into this set with a new mentality,’ we checked back in—we checked out, checked back in, it was a whole different game.”
Looking at the season ahead, Coach Felicio explained: “I think a lot of people are thinking…we’re not gonna be the same team because we lost our whole starting line up, and—which is definitely—for sometimes it is gonna be a shift, a huge change, but watching these girls play, it just seems like they’ve been playing with each other for so long. Everything’s clicking, but, I think the key factors that we’re really trying to put emphasis on is serve-receive. If you can’t serve-receive, you know, you can never continue—you can’t play offense—you can’t have that offense and you’re just gonna keep giving them free balls. So, that’s the big emphasis this year.”
Following their opening match against Ashland (last year 11–9) on Wednesday the 9th, the Warriors (last year 16–4) will be hosting Weston (last year 9–9) at 6:30 this evening. Their next home match will be against Nipmuc Regional (last year 13–8) on Friday, September 18th at 6:30. Their annual Dig Pink to raise money to fight breast cancer will be at home on October 15th, and their senior night will be on October 30th.
Warriors’ schedules can be found online at: arbiterlive.com.
