Keep moving forward, like Payton Aparicio is doing on this shot. (John Fisken photo)
Dear Coupeville High School varsity volleyball squad,
This is a conversation we’d all prefer not to be having.
In a perfect world, the finish Thursday night would have matched the beginning, and all we’d be discussing is a victory, one that played out in front of a raucous home crowd, one that could have been a defining moment for a young team.
But, things happen.
Leads evaporate, wins turn into losses, slipping through your fingers before you fully know what has happened.
The reality is, Chimacum somehow escaped with a 13-25, 11-25, 25-22, 25-21, 15-11 win and, there’s no two ways about it, that stings.
It stings because it drops you to 1-5, but there is a small silver lining.
While the Cowboys are a 1A Olympic League rival, Thursday’s match was tossed onto the schedule at the last second and is considered a non-league match.
It wouldn’t have helped or hurt you in the pursuit of a playoff spot, no matter how the score played out.
You will get two more chances to play Chimacum — Oct. 15 at their place and Oct. 22 back in the CHS gym.
Those two matches are the ones you will be graded on, and you know, without a doubt, this is a team you can beat. A team you should beat.
Which is why tonight, as you reflect on your performance, and tomorrow, when you return to practice, and next Tuesday, when you return to match play, you need to decide something.
Each and every one of you who pulls on a Wolf uniform needs to look inside themselves and say, this was a bump in the road, a learning lesson. It will not break us, it will not define us.
If you embrace the challenge, and don’t give in to the despair of the moment, there is a lot left to play.
Two more non-conference matches, then the six that will decide whether you, the 2015 Wolves, will make the postseason.
Nothing is set in stone. Your future is yours to decide.
If you play like you did in the first two sets, when you were a free-swinging team pushing the pace, playing quickly and ferociously, you can stun some folks.
In that first set, you were on fire, from the first point.
Lauren Rose served things up and McKenzie Bailey put the first point down with emphasis, blasting the ball off of the shoelaces of a Cowboy caught like a deer in the headlights.
And that’s how it was for most of the early going.
You, the Wolves, weren’t content to keep the ball in play and hope Chimacum made mistakes. You forced them to, and then took advantage when they frequently did.
Whether it was Katrina McGranahan going airborne to stuff a would-be spike, Emma Smith slicing a winner off a Cowboy shoulder, Tiffany Briscoe snapping off a string of nonreturnable serves or Ally Roberts and Valen Trujillo being freakin’ everywhere, Coupeville was large and in charge.
Nothing changed in the second set.
Smith and McGranahan teamed up for a stuff, Bailey and Payton Aparicio were dropping lasers and you closed out the set with a truly scary spike that came off of Smith’s fingertips like a cannon shot.
But then something happened.
You were never out of the match in any of the final three sets, never rolled over, never quit.
But you did get tentative, and Chimacum, given a chance to stay alive, did just enough to slip through and snatch one away.
Maybe it was the noise — give Chimacum’s JV players some credit, they held their own audibly against a hyped-up Wolf student section led by Ryan Griggs and Lathom Kelley — but you didn’t wilt.
You went down swinging, fighting off set points in both the third and fourth, once on a nasty service ace from McGranahan and once on an even-nastier spike by Bailey.
Playing from behind, as you did in all three of the final sets, is hard. Every error is magnified, and the margin of error gets slimmer and slimmer.
But, we’re not going to focus on the final score. It is what it is, and it alone won’t define your season.
You put up some nice stats, with Trujillo (20 digs, six aces), Rose (18 assists, five aces), Sydney Autio (15 assists, four aces) and Bailey (13 kills) leading the way.
Toss in Briscoe (seven aces, 14 digs) and McGranahan (three aces, nine kills) and the stat sheet got filled.
Of course, that’s not much solace, but it’s not meant to be.
In the end, you have been given a chance, an opportunity to decide for yourselves how this season will play out.
You can feel sorry for yourself and give up, or, if you are as strong as I believe you to be, you can take tonight’s match and use it to drive yourself onward and upward.
Do not give in. Do not doubt yourself.
Embrace what went right tonight and have the guts to look at what went wrong, and why it went wrong.
Come out stronger tomorrow, just as dedicated and determined as you have been this entire time.
One loss does not define you as a team or as individual players. Getting back off the mat after that loss is what will define you.
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