Photo/Micheal Rios
By Micheal Rios, Tulalip News
The Lady Hawks played their third straight home game of the young season on Tuesday, September 22. They hosted the Eagles of Grace Academy.
In the 1st game, Grace Academy came out firing on all cylinders and made short work of the home team 25-10. During the short between game intermission, Lady Hawks Coach Tina Brown pleaded with her team to communicate. “Ladies, you have to talk out there. I’m going to keep rotating players until I find that person who is not going to stop communicating and keeping everyone on their toes.”
The 2nd game was highly contested and saw the Lady Hawks play their best volleyball of the season. They seemingly matched Grace Academy point for point and were communicating as a team as their coach had urged them to. Tied 16-16, Grace Academy took a timeout. Following the timeout, the Lady Hawks went back to bad habits of not communicating and gave up some easy points. That made all the difference as they lost the 2nd game 20-25.
The Lady Hawks didn’t respond well to start off the 3rd game and quickly found themselves down 2-10. They hung in there and did their best to keep one another positive. The closest they’d get back in the game was 15-20, as they went on to drop the 3rd game 15-25, and lost the match 0-3.
Following the game, #10 Keryn Parks shared her thoughts on the match. “During practice this week, we’ve been working really hard on our fundamentals; digs, spikes, settings and serves. I think we are improving every game and we are learning from our mistakes.
“I honestly think we are getting better because it’s a competition for us to be on the court playing, we all want playing time and as much time on the court as we can get. So we’re all trying to be loud and communicate and play our best. Going forward we need to work on communicating better and getting our serves over the net. They are just like free-throws, the more practice the better they’ll be.”
Contact Micheal Rios, mrios@tulaliptribes-nsn.gov