Varsity Girls Volleyball: Cowboys Struggle Against St. Thomas

Junior Maya Carter spikes the ball at the St. Thomas defense. The Cooper City High School girls' varsity volleyball team faced off against St. Thomas in their first district match. Photo Credit: SARAH ROUSSELL

BY JAKE FIERMAN

The Cooper City High School girls’ volleyball team took on St. Thomas Aquinas this past Wednesday, September 7, in their fourth game of the season. Although the Cowboys didn’t start off the season so well, they looked to overcome the past three games. With starting libero Heather Lockwood sidelined due to an ankle injury, the season wasn’t going to start off easily.

In the first game, the Cowboys came on strong, looking for a difficult win. Cooper City took the early lead but St. Thomas began to make a comeback. Allison Balenger on St. Thomas started to score multiple points from spikes on all areas of the court. With great efforts by the entire Cowboys’ team, Amanda Pelaez, the setter on the team, stood out in the first game. She performed very well by setting up multiple players on the team and she even scored multiple points. The Cowboys tried to regain the lead, however, St.Thomas received continuous points to go on an 8-0 run and finished off game 1 with a final score of 25-10.

The next game started off similarly for the Cowboys. Cooper City’s libero junior T.K. Nichols was all over the court trying to keep the team alive, however, St. Thomas continued to hold the lead throughout and went on to win 25-15 despite the solid effort by the Cowboys.

In the third game, St. Thomas scored consecutive points until Cooper City came back to even the score at 6-6. St. Thomas began to pour on points and went on an 8-1 scoring run, breaking away and finishing the game 25-16. In the end St. Thomas won 3 games to none. Although the Cowboys lost their 4th match in a row the team was still very positive for games to come.

“I feel like the game went a lot better than expected.” Nichols said.” I felt we actually pulled through and played like a team despite the score and without Heather we definitely didn’t have the passes we needed to get our offense started.”

The Cowboy’s coach, Ms. O’Linn also had a positive outlook on the game despite losing the match.

“The team exceeded our expectations for this game, we set the goal, and surpassed it” Coach O’Linn said. “To improve, the team needs to talk more on the court, communicate better overall, and in the end I think we played well as a whole.”