The Windsor Wizards break a huddle during Tuesday’s match against Thompson Valley. (Aislyn Carrillo/CHSAANow.com)
WINDSOR — The Wizards of Windsor High School may have let their nerves get to them in the first set of the match, but after that, there was no looking back. The Wizards stormed back to win their match against Thompson Valley 3-1 (23-25, 25-14, 25-21, 25-20).
“We were really nervous going into our first set,” senior Jordyn White said. “We were playing too tedious, like a deer in headlights.”
Windsor (1-0 overall) started out strong with a 7-point lead against the Eagles (0-1). Many defensive errors on Windsor’s part caused the Eagles to tie up the set at 13-13. The teams played neck and neck up until the last two points of the set and two unsuccessful spikes from Windsor resulted with a tight score of 23-25.
The Wizard’s head coach, Laverne Huston believes her team had few too many unforced errors, which set them back in the first set of the game.
Going into the second set, the Wizards had their game faces on. The team’s defense was playing harder, they had a steady three-point lead during the start and slowly increased their lead with the final score being 25-14.
With one of the Eagles’ biggest rivalries of the year coming up on Thursday, coach Nathan Fristed believes that his “team needs to work on their serving and cleaning up their blocks.”
Thompson Valley. (Aislyn Carrillo/CHSAANow.com)
Thompson Valley came into the third set knowing what they wanted, and they fought until the end. They had many outstanding roofs that kept the score close throughout the game. Net violations and service errors seemed to have kept the Eagles from being able to come out on top. Both teams played well offensively, but the lack of communication from the Eagles ended up keeping momentum with the Wizards.
Fristed says that his team is lacking practice time because they are unable to practice in their school gym. He believes that they are going into the season with a disadvantage since their time on the court has been limited to less than 10 hours a week.
With or without a great amount of practice time, the Eagles played as hard as they could, and it showed. Although their defense came out slow in the fourth set, they were still able to maintain a close final score. The Wizards kept a consistent lead on Thompson Valley as the Eagle’s balls kept going straight into the net, or completely out of bounds.
The crowd was wild on both ends, with every play, the crowd grew louder and louder which stood out to the Windsor players.
“Shout out to our student section. It really helped us out tonight and it was nice to have them there,” junior outside hitter Madi Bruen said.
With a handful of games coming up, Huston believes they “can improve on our entire game. We are looking forward to our upcoming games, one of our freshman who was not able to be here tonight will start, and there will be a number of different line ups to look forward to.”