1.) Serving? No not really? It killed us in both loses. We missed 7 serves against West Central and 7 against S. Newton.
Championship serving. First set, Paige missed and then Kelsey missed. Back-to-back misses. I feel sorry for both kids. We are asking so much of Paige. In this current line up, when she misses, Kelsey has to help her out. Only Kelsey is new to serving, and we have made some major changes to her serve over the last week before we knew she would be serving. Paige missing puts pressure on Kelsey to help her out. Kelsey has enough pressure trying to hold that hand calm and not rotate her upper body, which puts her serving shoulder behind her.
In the 2nd set of the championship match, we missed three out of four serves between the 5th point, an ace, and the 10-12th points by Herron. Then lets go one more body. After Herron gets us back into the match, Paige misses. She gets an ace after hitting the net and getting lucky, the ball fell over, but then her very next serve is long. Take it a 3rd step. They side out Kelsey and then Morgan misses a first serve. The worst part, every kid but one scored before missing. Four of six servers missed to end their serve or never even got it started. Imagine the damage we might have achieved if we force the Rebels to receive? I thought they were shaky in the seams.
Take Adelle. our freshwoman, out of the equation and we scored on on over half of our serves. Take Kelsey out, who is new to serving, and we scored on 61.6% of our serves. When we did not shoot ourselves in the foot, we were making hay. In that 2nd set, we actually violated both my rules for serving. Morgan missed back-to-back after rotating through the rotation and Morgan and Adelle missed back-to-back.
Big picture? First set - Paige misses and Kelsey misses. We serve one more time, a side out, before losing 19-25.
Second set - Morgan is the last in the string of misses. They side out Adelle. McMains serves an ace for our
19th point and then South Newton sides her out. We lost 19-25.
Lets look at a win. Tri-County. FIrst set. We win big. Could have been bigger! Herron scores 1 point and misses. Paige scores 4 points and misses. Morgan scores 2 points and misses. Adelle scores 1 points and misses. Makayla scores 14 points! Wait - she never missed. Tri-County scored one point in that set, a punch on an out of system ball. All their other points came on our missed serves.
But Tri-County is bad. South Newton is not. Tri-County could not take advantage of our misses and create pressure. The Rebels could and did.
We want to average 1.75 misses per set. We will win against a number of teams at 1.75. We beat Rossville because we were way below that number. We simply did not give away points and kept pressure on them. We lost to Clinton Central in part because we missed 2.5 serves per set. Clinton Prairie was 2.0. We lost. Tri-County was 2.0, but they only have two wins. West Central was 2.33. We lost. Caston was 2.0, but they have not won a match yet this season. South Newton was 3.5 misses. We lost.
And lets be honest. Some points are just bigger than others. I dislike this philosophy, but it is what it is. I miss a serve at 4-4. We have 21 points to overcome my mistake and bail me out. I miss a serve at 25-24, serving for the set. Well, that is totally different. And guess how that set turned out when we missed into the bottom of the net at 25-24 at Prairie? We lost 26-28.