OLDS — The École Olds High School senior boys volleyball team planned to make good use of their bye this week as they prepare for a tournament Nov. 3-4 in Strathmore.
Head coach Kristy Hartt says the Spartans showed what they can do last week when they beat Sundre in all four sets.
They played in Banff this past weekend, but results weren’t available at press time.
The Spartans nearly won their home tournament, held Oct. 13-14 in the Community Learning Campus Gym.
They ended up losing a hard-fought final to George Mac of Airdrie to finish second.
“We lost the first set 25-23 in an exciting back and forth match,” Hartt wrote in an email.
She said they lost the second set 25-17 “as we ran out of steam and lost one of our captains as he was hit in the head during the end of the first set.”
"We just didn’t bounce back after a rough start to the second set,” she added.
Hartt was pretty happy with how well the Spartans played, given that George Mac had some pretty experienced players on their squad.
She described them as “definitely our toughest competition of the weekend.”
“They have a core of five players who all play club ball throughout the year, so their time in the court is significantly higher than most of the players on our team,” she wrote.
However, despite that, Hartt felt the Spartans gave as good as they got.
“In the first set of the final they were extremely gritty and played very aggressively,” she wrote.
“We were hitting well, passing and blocking effectively and having success in all areas of our game. It was a very exciting set to watch. We had some big digs that kept our energy up in the game.”
She also thought that in the final, the guys did a better job of keeping their emotions in check and coming up with that extra effort than they did during the round robin portion of that tournament.
“I gave the boys exactly one minute following that game to say what we they wanted to release it and then come back with a better focus for moving forward,” she wrote.
