After a back and forth battle to win the first set against Laney College, the Mustangs finished strong by dominating the second and third sets in a 3-0 win Wednesday, September 24.
The first set of the match was tightly contested with Laney leading for most of the set and the Mustangs charging back late to win the set 25-21.
A big part of the comeback in the first set was outside hitter Taylor Scriven who continued to add to her kills total that currently stands at 247, good for second in the state.
Scriven said that the team played down to the level of their opponent in the first set and needed a fire to get going.
“I think we realized that we were a lot better team than we played in the first set and we lit a fire and it sparked and came up and we were ready to go,” she said.
Head coach Lou Panzella echoed Scriven’s sentiment adding that the team made a lot of errors and gave away points.
“We gave away a lot of points,” he said. “Once we got our ball control we started making less hitting errors, we started controlling the ball a little better and we were not giving away so many points. Prior to that we just had a hard time finding the court.”
The team really turned it around in the second two sets winning 25-12 and 25-8 to finish off the victories.
The key to the turn around was ball control, and because of that ball control the Mustangs were able to rattle off multiple runs of points.
“We had several 5, 6, 7 point runs of service and that doesn’t happen very often,” Panzella said.
Those multiple point runs were important because Panzella said Laney played strong defense and the team was still able to rattle off consecutive points.
While they played well on defense all the way through, they did not play well overall the rest of the way which seemed to take a toll on the Laney players after the game.
After walking off of the court, two Laney players, Luisa Delos Reyes and Naima Ashford, got into a shouting match to the point where two teammates had to escort Reyes out of the gymnasium.
After the encounter, the entire team left the gymnasium quickly and were not available for comment.