Lady Vandals Host Pair this Week

A loss to Owyhee by the Vandals volleyball team on their two-match road trip last weekend will make the road to the playoffs a bit tougher.

Coach Katie Benson said first, the girls played at Carlin and won that match 25-11, 25-7, 25-6. “Carlin just couldn’t seem to get much going on. Their service game was pretty inconsistent plus making a lot of unforced ball handling errors.”

In the final set, Benson said Eureka’s sophomore Josie Hoekenga served 21 points in a row, which is a unique accomplishment. “I was really happy for her because she has said one of her personal goals is to be more consistent serving. We had several of the girls have long service runs, but nothing like Josie.”

At Owyhee on Saturday, the Lady Vandals entered the match having lost to the Braves in the previous two matches. “It’s always hard to play Owyhee (11-5, 5-0)”, Benson said, “they are always scrappy and send a lot back over.” Scores were 15-25, 26-28, 18-25.

Benson said, “However, we now know what we need to do defensively against them. They really targeted out setter Shauna Brown. She did a great job defensively, had 13 digs in the match, and Hoekenga had 10, but when we are pulled out of our offense we struggled with that. It helped us see the need to have someone else, other than Shauna setting the ball. Owyhee was really targeting the right side of the court which is a bit unusual for the teams that we play. We’re very used to having our outsides, cross court and the Libero digging, not so much hit to the setter over and over again. Definitely something we will need to adjust for next time we meet them, along with mental toughness.”

The possibility of a rematch might come in the 1A Northern Regional playoffs Nov. 3-4 at Wooster High in Reno.

This has been Homecoming week for Eureka and the girls played host to Wells on Thursday and have a double-header match with McDermitt on Friday.