Immediately following the Emporia High volleyball team’s fourth and final loss of the day at Saturday’s Emporia Invitational, Spartan coach Kendra Bloomquist gathered her team in a circle and told each of her players to turn to their left and tell a teammate what she did well during the day.
The exercise was designed to help her team realize that there were some good things that took place, though the positives might have been a little hard to pick out.
“Usually we’ve had maybe one game or one match in a night that wasn’t good, but we put four bad matches together (Saturday), which is not something you want to do at this time of the year,” Bloomquist said. “We had to refocus, because it’s too important right now for us to sit and dwell on how poorly we played. So we needed to keep in mind that there were some good things that happened, it’s just that the bad far outweighs the good when you’ve got a situation like what we had.”
The Spartans struggled with their consistency all day long, winning just a single game — which came during a 2-1 loss to Lawrence — while being swept, 2-0, in losses to Shawnee Mission Northwest, Lawrence Free State and Maize.
“It was a rough day and we weren’t very consistent,” senior Jessica Muckenthaler said. “We would play well for a couple plays and then let the other team get runs on us. We just couldn’t balance it out.”
Perhaps the best example of Emporia High’s inability to put together quality stretches of play came in the match against Shawnee Mission Northwest after a tournament-opening loss to Free State.
The Spartans jumped out to a 5-0 lead in Game One and kept Northwest at bay thanks to five Muckenthaler kills. A service ace by Summer Naab gave EHS a 23-20 lead late, and it looked as if the Spartans would take the first game.
But attack errors by Naab and Nicole Burdiek and a lift call on EHS allowed Shawnee Mission Northwest to tie the game at 23, and two kills by Northwest’s Sarah Sliva gave the Cougars the game at 25-23. Behind three kills each by Sliva and Angela Mings in Game Two, Northwest cruised to a 25-15 win to take the match, 2-0.
“We had the first game won and gave it away,” Bloomquist said. “and in the second set just chucked it. We went from such highs to such lows all day.”
In the third match of the day against Lawrence, the Spartans took a game from the Lions but fell in three games, 2-1.
After dropping Game One, 25-17, Emporia High benefited from three Lawrence net serves and another five kills from Muckenthaler to rebound and take Game Two, 25-14.
“We got some help in the second game,” Bloomquist said. “We got a couple of calls that went our way and they (Lawrence) put some serves into the net. When we get that kind of momentum, we can be tough to stop.”
But it was all Lawrence in Game Three, as the Lions’ Tayler Tolefree put down four kills to go with three team blocks and four Lawrence service aces to take the game, 25-10, and the match, 2-1.
“We played well and then we just couldn’t finish the match,” Muckenthaler said. “We need to work on finishing games and matches, because that’s keeping us from winning right now.”
Emporia High lost the day’s final match against Maize, 2-0 (25-11, 25-23), to finish the tournament winless.
Heading into the final week before Regionals, Bloomquist said she hopes her team forgets about the way it played this weekend.
“We were just so terribly inconsistent,” Bloomquist said. “Honestly, sometimes that just happens, but we have to refocus this week and have some good practices and put this behind us.
“If we dwell on this, it’s going to be ugly.”