The Co-op Challenge series trophy is once again the property of the Weyburn Comprehensive School Eagles.
The Eagles defeated the Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) Elecs in both the senior boys and girls volleyball games on Oct. 16 in Weyburn to sweep the fourth annual best-of-four volleyball showdown.
ECS won the tournament last year, after Weyburn had won the challenge in the first two years.
The game between the two senior girls teams in Weyburn was close, as the Eagles defeated the Elecs 3-2 (18-25, 25-20, 25-14, 21-25 and 15-10).
“I am very pleased with how we played,” said Elecs head coach Nicole Rogalski. “There are couple of things that we do need to work on, but overall we had a really good game. Our serves improved a little bit. And on offence and on defence, the girls played well.”
The Elecs came out strong in the first set, while Weyburn seemed to struggle early, Rogalski said. Estevan’s serves were excellent, and the Elecs missed just one or two serves in the first set.
Areas she believes they need to keep working on include blocking, passing and the consistency of their serving.
While they lost both matches on the senior girls side, it was the best the Elecs have played in the four years of the series.
She hopes their play in the Co-op Challenge will give the Elecs some momentum late in the year.
“With Weyburn being a big competition, while girls came off the court … a little sad that we didn’t win the series, overall they were very happy and proud of how they played, so that’s a good mindset to go into for the rest of our season,” she said.
As for the senior boys, they dropped a 3-1 (21-25, 25-13, 25-23, 26-24) decision to the Eagles in Weyburn. Assistant coach Kevin Perkins said it was a vast improvement from the match in Estevan eight days earlier, when the Elecs lost in straight sets.
Perkins said they had the Eagles on the ropes and had them nervous early on, but they couldn’t close out the two close sets.
“We weren’t nervous. It’s always tough,” said Perkins. “Everybody always talks about the home field advantage, but for high school, I think it’s almost a home field disadvantage, where we’re nervous, we have friends in attendance and we don’t want to mess up.”
The Eagles appeared to be nervous in the opening set, he said.
ECS had better serving, and they were much better at blocking than they were the previous week.
“As soon as we start blocking a few, that shuts their big hitters down,” said Perkins.
Perkins stressed the players are still young, and it still showed at times in the match in Weyburn. But even after they struggled in the second set, they came out hard for the final two sets and pushed the Eagles to the limit.
