Hosting a junior girls volleyball tournament isn’t just as easy as getting teams organized to come to your gym and getting a few volleyballs and refs together.
Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) hosted a junior girls tournament on the weekend and ran into difficulties organizationally. Some teams had pulled out leaving head coach Tamara Franklin and the Elecs with some holes to fill.
“We had a couple that pulled out pretty much on the day of the tournament for age restriction reasons,” said Franklin. “There’s a new age limit this year as to who can play with whom, and so those teams unfortunately couldn’t make it to the tournament.”
She split the Elecs junior girls into two teams and those teams finished in third place and sixth place.
“We had to revamp our schedule and in order to make sure that every team was able to get six games minimum, I was able to say ‘Why don’t I just split my team?’”
Franklin coached the B team and assistant coach Erin Wagstaff took the A team, although in the A team’s 25-13, 25-12 loss to Weyburn in the semifinal, Franklin was able to watch from the stands.
“It worked out perfectly because every girl was able to play every game, all the time,” Franklin said. “The problem is they get tired fast.”
When teams play at the senior level, it’s often the case where the teams will be playing as often as the Elecs teams did.
“For those players that want to look at playing at the senior level, at a senior level tournament, they have to look at the situation and think ‘I’m going to be in this similar type situation in those tournaments’” said Franklin.
After adding three players who didn’t make the team after the try-out process to fill the two teams, Franklin was happy with the way the individual players were able to rise to the challenge and bring out some good play.
“With the girls that I did split up, I took them and said we were going to work together and develop our skills,” she said. “We may not win but we’re here to advance our skills. And those girls I coached did so well.”
Franklin said a couple of the players picked up on some of the timing and setting better than they had earlier this year.
The Elecs will get back together in practice and start getting ready to host districts this year, facing some of the teams they had hosted on the weekend.
“We did some repositioning, and we did some different situations because we had to do different strategies and different situations,” Franklin said. “We’ll take the best of those and see what we can do to accommodate… for the teams we’ll be playing at districts.”
Districts will be Nov. 7 at the ECS gym.
