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I wanted to post quick comments about tonight's match at St. Peter & Paul (A) although I have to travel to PA yet tonight on business so I apologize for not being able to get the usual match update finished tonight.  I know some of the boys like to read it the next day.  Both Charlie and I were very proud of the boy's efforts tonight even though we did end up on the loosing end of the match.

We did take the first game off this team and competed at a much higher level than in Monday's match and at times came very close to pulling this match out before succumbing to a very good team.  The boys left it all on the court tonight and played very hard and fought for many points.  They dove for balls and dug out tough hits many times and served like we always know that we can as that is a definite strength on this team.  Many times it's only 3 or 4 plays that separates one team from the next as when you are down 22-15, 3 plays the other direction makes it a bascially tied game and a rush to the finish.

I believe they learned much about themselves tonight and now truly believe that they can play with anybody if they put their mind to it and continue to carry today's attitude over into practice and their upcoming matches.  The St. Peter & Paul coach was very gracious in taking a moment to speak to them and telling them that they played awesome and could beat anybody on a given night with that effort.

The season statistics were updated with everything except for passing and in-play hitting from tonight's match so you will find serving, setting, blocking, hitting kills and hitting errors were updated as I had those with me.

We now have (2) matches under our belt and the boys performed very well.  In the first game which we won, Spenser H. opened up with 16 consecutive serves in before missing and 10 of those were aces!  Jake C. had 4 and Marc G. had 3 to finish the match, while neither of them missed a serve.  Jake C. led the team with 5 passes while Mark G. had 3 passes while Alex H. had 2 and several others with one.  Marc G. led the team with 3 hits, 2 of those for kill.  Jake C. led the setting with 3 sets.

In the second game we won again with Wyatt W. leading the team with 7 serves, 6 of those for aces while Alex. H. had 4 ace serves and Spenser H. had 4 more serves in.  Michael S. led the team with 6 passes, Mike K. had 6 passes while Anthony B., Alex H. and Spenser H. all had 3 good passes.  Wyatt W. led the hitting with 3 hits while Alex H. and Peter J. each had 2 hits.  Michael S. led the setting with 3 sets while Mike K. added 2 sets.

We also won the third game and Peter J.  and Jake C. both led the serving with 6 good serves each, while Anthony B. contributed 5 serves and Jake L. had 3.  Passing was led by Jake C. with 5 passes followed by Rob D. and Wyatt W. both with 3 passes each.  Rob D. also had the only successful hit of this game, way to go Rob!  Setting was led by Jake C. with 2 sets.

It truly was a team effort as there was very little drop off when we started substituting right away in the start of the second game.  I'm proud of the fact that as a team we only missed 6 serves all day!  That can be a winning formula if we can keep that type of serving up as some of these guys can hit ball pretty hard and/or low and effectively.  I expect the level of competition to pick up next Monday when we have a double-header at home.  The stats for today's match are found by clicking here.