Girls Volleyball falls to Palo Alto High School 3-0
MVHS loses its undefeated streak in seventh game of the season
Senior Marissa Jensen prepares to leap into the air to receive a pass from her teammate.
September 16, 2021
The Varsity Girls Volleyball team lost to Palo Alto High School 3-0 in its seventh game and first league game of the season on Sept. 9, breaking its undefeated 6-0 start to the season and bringing its season record to 6-1.
“I think sometimes we got stuck in a rut and [didn’t] communicate [so] the ball dropped between two people when it shouldn’t have,” sophomore Evelyn Xie said.
PAHS utilized their middles early and often, scoring early points from the middle before spreading out sets and kills to the pin hitters. Offensively, MVHS was stonewalled by PAHS blockers. As a result, MVHS attempted to use strategies such as soft hits to attack PAHS. Junior Sydney Su says that these hits were a large reason MVHS was somewhat successful.
“I think against big hitters, it’s a lot easier, and it worked out a lot better to hit smarter than hard,” Su said. “If it’s open, then you don’t need to hit hard every time. Doing that against big hitters really helped.”
Both Xie and Su believe that fewer passing errors in addition to smarter hits would have improved MVHS’ chances of winning. However, overall, Xie believes that the game went better than expected.
“Even though we didn’t win, I think it was actually pretty good because we were playing against stronger opponents,” sophomore Evelyn Xie said. “[In future games], we should definitely make less errors, [so] we’re the ones that are controlling the game instead of the other team.”
