Coming off a loss on March 10 against Cupertino High School, which is currently ranked first in the SCVAL De Anza League, Varsity Boys Volleyball fell 3-1 to The Harker School on Friday, March 17 in its first home game. THS secured the first two sets 25-17 and 27-25, and although MVHS was able to win the third set 25-23, the team lost the last set 25-23, ultimately losing the game. 

Senior Jesse Li partly attributes the defeat to passing and hitting errors. Moreover, he notes that since there were a lot of injuries prior to the game, the players had not been able to practice together a lot, which led to a lack of team communication that made it more difficult to develop strategies.

“This was our first game with all our players, so I knew it was going to be rough,” Li said. “We were constantly making changes. We were switching players around every single set and were pretty unprepared.”

Despite MVHS falling behind earlier in the sets, the Matadors were able to make several comebacks to even out the scores. Li says that the neck and neck rallies that came out of these comebacks in the later sets were a result of the players’ resilience.

Moving forward, Li believes an area that the team can work on is incorporating more variation regarding hits and positioning in order to deviate from its current predictability and deliver better offensive techniques.

Sophomore Praneel Shah is hopeful that the team will perform better going into this season and work together to prevent unforced errors such as hitting the ball into the net or outside the court. 

“We pushed hard even when we lost the first set,” Shah said. “We put up a good fight in the second set and even when we went down [by] almost 10 points. We will continue to play hard like we did and hopefully that will translate into a win [in the future].”

Gallery • 5 Photos

Lauren Chuu

Junior Solomon So jumps up to serve the ball to start a rally against THS.