Ladt T-Birds fall to Yavapai
Jeff Moses
The Mesa Community College Thunderbirds women’s volleyball team continued its losing ways on Sept. 21, after falling to the Yavapai Roughriders three matches to one.
In the first match, Mesa scored first off the serve of Chelsey Hall, but couldn’t put together a string of solid play again in the match, and eventually fell to Yavapai 13-25.
In the second match, the ladies of Mesa turned on, and behind the energetic play of team captain Lexi Peru, they took their lone match victory from the Roughriders.
Peru plays libero, which is a defensive specialist with different rules than the other players and a contrasting jersey, so the referees can tell them apart from their teammates to keep better track of them.
“Their libero did a great job playing defense passing balls. We were really trying to keep it away from her and she kept pinching her outsides and taking more court. She’s solid. She’s a real good player,” Roughriders coach Matt Cohen said about Peru.
At match point during the second match, with her team up 24-20, T-bird Jessica Iniguez put a little sauce on the ball with a hard spike to win the match 25-20 and tie up the game one match apiece.
Iniguez’ spike would be the offensive highlight for the Mesa women in a game that their coach Brent Martindale said it had “a few too many sometimes bonehead errors.”
The Thunderbirds had no more luck overcoming their errors in the third match than in the second, and saw the Roughriders put five points on the board before scoring one of their own, eventually losing 18-25.
The fourth match would be all she wrote for the Thunderbirds who quite literally beat themselves, when on match point Chelsey Hall failed to put the ball over the net, thus securing the Roughriders’ 25-21 victory.
“I just didn’t feel like we had a standout tonight unfortunately,” coach Martindale said. “At moments, (the team) looked decent, but tonight Yavapai is basically trying to hand it to us, and we just kind of squandered the opportunity, way too many errors. “
“Volleyball is a game of errors, and we made less,” coach Cohen said. “They (Mesa) didn’t capitalize on our mistakes as well as we did on theirs, and (we) got the victory.”
