By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Sports Editor
Volleyball players are back on the court and ready for the season after a tournament up north last weekend. The Sitka High Lady Wolves won three games and lost one in the Nikiski tournament, claiming third place overall.
The Wolves lost two other games outside of the tournament, finishing the weekend with a 3-3 record.
Losses in games against big 4A teams up north served as a valuable learning experience, junior Ava Brady told the Sentinel.
“It’s so nice being back. It’s awesome because traveling gives us really good competition so we’re ready... Being able to play 4A teams, we might lose but they’re important losses so that we can learn… It was just a really good tournament, we played well together,” Brady said at practice on Tuesday.
Facing off against teams from big schools such as Kenai is a useful challenge, Brady noted.
“Playing this weekend has definitely helped my defense, because playing against harder hitters has helped me have faster reflexes,” she said.
With six players lost to graduation last spring, this year’s team has significant gaps to fill. Senior Chloe Morrison was happy to be back on the volleyball court, and noted that the first tournament went smoothly for such a new team.
“It’s great. I love that we can actually have a full season and plan on having Regions, so that’s nice… I feel like we did pretty well for our first games,” Morrison said. “At least with our whole new team, since last year we had the same team moving up.”
Last year, the pandemic significantly curtailed sports travel in Alaska. In November of 2020, the Region V volleyball tournament was canceled due to a rise in coronavirus cases in Sitka and around the state. Sitka schools reopened for in-person learning and athletic activities late last month.
This season, the team plans to travel around the state again, albeit with virus precautions such as masking and testing. Spectators are not allowed at games played at Sitka High when the School District remains at high virus risk.
On the varsity team for the first time, junior setter Andrea Winger is happy for the chance to play a variety of teams.
“We have been playing other teams that we haven’t played before, and I’ve never been on varsity, but this year I am. And it’s faster paced than JV, that’s really fun… Everyone’s improved since my freshman year,” Winger said. “I think I’ve improved a lot from where I am now. Setting to my teammates so they can kill it and keep our points up.”
With the team setter Zaeda Dumag injured, Winger had ample opportunities to play in this weekend’s tournament.
In some of the games the team notched a significant number of kills – unreturnable hits that result in points.
“Every time we got a kill, we got really excited and if our energy got down we would kill it and we would get so pumped up. It was so amazing, yeah, it was the best feeling,” Winger said.
Moving farther into the season, Winger hopes that the team can maintain a high level of energy.
“By keeping our energy up and keeping up – this year it’s different because there’s a lot of people coming up to varsity that we’re not used to playing with,” she said, “and it was pretty fun getting used to each other but we’re just getting there, finding our groove.”
Morrison led her team in kills, followed by Brady.
In the team’s first games of the season, coach Zaide Allen said that her players hit the ball well but there is room for improvement.
“We were really strong at hitting. We barely had any hitting errors,” Allen said. “We did pretty well with serving; overall with our serve receive we did really well… We need to minimize mistakes and communication errors, and that is a part of not having those (graduated) seniors there. They’ve been used to playing next to the same teammate there for the last two or three years.”
The current squad, the coach said, works particularly hard.
“They work hard, and they want to do better and I think they are very motivated to make it work and our seniors are just really solid… We had one game where we had no hitting errors, not one,” Allen recalled. “It was versus Nikiski and we just kept hitting it and hitting it and hitting it.”
Over the weekend, Sitka beat Nikiski twice. The Lady Wolves’ only tournament loss was to Soldotna.
In hindsight, Brady thought that the team did well overall, but communication can always be improved.
“Team chemistry I think, and energy for sure was really good this weekend… Even though we do have good communication,” Brady said, “our communication could be better as all things can always get better… just playing better together as a team, because no one person is going to win a game for us. So we’ve got to all work together to win.”
Morrison expects that it will take some effort for the squad to work together seamlessly.
“As a team we just need to work together because there are so many different skill levels,” the senior said. “And as an individual I want to try to be stronger, because I’ve had back issues in the past so I don’t want to be sitting out again.”
The Lady Wolves play again this weekend. The schedule is below.
