Tough season for Alberton volleyball

Coming out of the 2009 volleyball season, Coach Rachel Clevenger said that this year the team had pans to work on improving in the areas of serving and passing. Both of those areas, she said, were the two biggest areas that they needed to improve upon and were also two critical skills to putting together a great game of volleyball.

“We’re also going to need more movement on defense and offense,” Clevenger noted.

She said that to accomplish these things, she was bringing together a new set of drills for the girls that would get them moving as well as motivate and encourage them. Thirteen girls showed up for the first practice of the season and the team was split with six seniors and seven freshmen.

“It’s a real good group of seniors,” Clevenger said of the crew, “and they’ll need to help out as much as they can with the freshman to teach them. They’re going to be our backup.”

The overall goal going into the season was to make it to district play and to get the freshman as much experience as necessary because they would ultimately be the varsity next year.

“The freshmen are going to get some playing time,” Clevenger said.

The first practice was rough as the freshmen learned how drills worked and everyone worked to get back in shape for the upcoming season. Clevenger said that one of the goals was not to have any dropped balls right off the bat and with that in mind, the girls dove into the 2010 season of volleyball.

But the girls had a rough first game of the season with a matchup against Phillipsburg and then a tournament in Drummond the next day. Clevenger said that when they played Phillipsburg it was obvious that they were playing the first game of the season.

“There were some first game jitters,” Clevenger said. “They were hesitant about doing anything and they just looked confused and not quite sure what to do.”

The girls lost fairly badly and Clevenger said that lots of things were wrong. However, some of the freshmen got out on the court to play and Clevenger was impressed by their efforts.

“They didn’t do too badly,” she said. “They served fairy well.”

At Drummond, the girls played against Arlee, Hot Springs, Lincoln and Seeley. They lost to Hot Springs and Arlee, and played a strong game against Seeley, 13-15.

“Seeley’s a pretty decent team,” Clevenger said after the match. “They have really hard hitters, good servers and are really tall at the net. We were matched up better with other teams, but didn’t play them well and this showed us, ‘yes, we can play.’”

Returning home from the tournament at Drummond, the team that there was still a lot of season left and it wouldn’t do them any good to get down about how things played out.

“My goal is to go from each game and work hard enough so that we could say we improved from the last game,” Clevenger explained. “As bad as we were, there’s room for improvement so we can reach that overall goal.”

The Noxon Lady Red Devils were no match for the Alberton girls’ volleyball team the following week. The Lady Panthers won the first three games and left the Lady Red Devils in the dusk.

The first game was a quick win for the Alberton girls and they bested their opponents 25 to 8. The early scores were close with the Lady Red Devil initially taking the lead, but once the home team overtook their opponent 4-3, the game was theirs for the rest of the way. The Alberton girls hit the double digits in the first game at 10 points, while the Lady Red Devils sat at four.

In the second game, the Alberton girls reached five points before the opposing team even grabbed one point. The Alberton girls kept climbing and eventually took a win in the second game, 25-14. Finally, the girls finished the match by winning the third game as well.

Just after the starting lineups were called, Noxon’s setter Shelby Clark came off the court after injuring her ankle. Alberton Coach Rachel Clevenger said that the incident may have played some impact in the way the match came out.

“They lost their setter before the game and I don’t know how much this affected them, but they seemed pretty young. I don’t know if they were quite as strong as other teams,” Clevenger said. “We’ll play Seeley this next week and they’re going to be a lot stronger team for us.”

In the Phillipsburg Tournament, the girls were slated to play Two Eagle in their first match, but they won by forfeit when the team didn’t show up. Next up, was a game against Drummond and the Lady Panthers lost.

Clevenger said that in tournament play it always seems to take a while for the girls to get moving, to get motivated in the morning.

“We were slow and again we missed a lot of serves,” Clevenger said. “I think that’s two big reasons we weren’t even playing with them.”

The season would be an up and down ride for the Lady Panthers, who won a few games here and there, but for the most part struggled with many of the same issues on hitting, passing and serving, but it all wasn’t bad. They ended up playing in districts just before drawing their season to a close. They played their last games against Granite and Lincoln.

Clevenger said that overall it was a hard season for the girls who lost most of the games they played. She said at times the girls were frustrated.

“After you lose several games in a row, you can kind of just go ‘uh,’” Clevenger said. “They saw what was in front of them and they were playing some really good teams.”

Clevenger said that despite the long season that was filled with losses rather than victories she said she was proud of the girls for giving each game an attempt.

“They were good about sticking with it,” she said. “We talked a lot about working hard, coming out not and giving up. In the end there we really struggled, and I thought they did come out. It was a long haul right at the end of the season and they stuck with it.”