After a 23-9 season, the girls volleyball team’s ambitions and expectations were higher than ever heading into the first round of the Southern California Regional Playoffs, where the second-seeded Wolverines would square off against the 15th seed, Beckman High School, Nov. 7. Prior to the game, captain Ava Zamora (11) said she expected a lot of the team and was confident in the team’s preparation.
“We’re working on our [team strategy] that we’re going to run against this specific team,” Zamora said. “We’re also trying to focus more on our mentality because when we get in our heads, we really can’t play our best, but we know that we can beat any team if we are at our best.”
The game prior against Torrey Pines was a close, back and forth game; however, with the 3-2 set loss the team took what strengths they had in the game and moved on. Zamora said that after that game, the team worked more in-depth on reading their opponent’s strategy rather than just understanding their own.
Another large factor of their success and their losses this season has been the expectation of the team. Captain Nia Thompson (11) said that the pressure building up after each win was difficult.
“I definitely think coming into the state playoffs since we’re ranked second, there’s a lot of expectation for us to win,” Thompson said. “Even though [most players] on the team felt the pressure could get to them, they knew that they had to stay strong mentally and push through the expectations.”
As the game started, Westview took over, getting off to a 13-7 lead early in the first set. During the set, Thompson, Zamora, and Vivian Roberts (10) all started strong. Their communication kept the team in sync. They continued to execute as a team as the set went on. However, Beckman continued to stay in it and made Westview fight to win the set, 25-21.
Westview continued to show strength through the first few points in the second set getting up 10-4. However, at that point something changed. Westview failed to compensate for the strong outside play from Beckman, and the momentum turned. Despite key blocks from Maren Zimmer (11) and a strong defensive presence towards the end of the set, it was not enough as the Wolverines fell, 25-18.
This trend continued through the third and fourth sets as the Beckman offense and defense continued to get better. After two sets won by Beckman with scores of 25-14 and 25-15 the season ended and Beckman prevailed 3-1.
Zamora said that a main reason for the change of play was that the Wolverines fell into row 1. Row 1 is when the players in the defending side all shift over to attempt to kill the ball, and when they do kill it after the spike, they aren’t in the best position to pass well and spike it to the other side. Still, she said that the team worked hard and gave it their all.
“We stayed together,” she said. “Maybe at the end, we could have had some more fire and not have given up so easily, but I think we did pretty well as a team.”
The team knew the game was going to be difficult and expected it to be close, but coming as the No. 2 seed makes the loss against the 15 seed a bit of a shock.
Nevertheless, they stayed together as their team had the whole season.
“I’ve never before encountered a team with genuine love for one another,” Torrie Parker (12) said. “They were all of my best friends and they knew everything about me and I knew everything about them. So, when we were playing on the court together, our dynamic was super fun and lively and energetic because we also had that level of love, respect, and compassion for one another outside of the volleyball courts.”
Many players on the team said they felt similarly.
“We knew that they would take it home, we knew we had to bring our A game to be able to beat them and we didn’t quite get there [that day],” Zamora said. “But, I know we really played well this season and looking back at our whole season, we were really successful, especially this program.”
