Lady Huskies struggle

By Marlys Good

The gymnasium at Big Horn was not a friendly environment for the Burlington Lady Huskies last weekend.
Coach Jerry Patrick summed the Big Horn Invitational Tournament up in five words, “It was not a good weekend.” Burlington lost its first pool match to Wright, 16-21, 9-21, and its second to Big Horn, 8-21, 12-21, before getting a victory over Moorcroft, 21-15, 21-20, in the final match in preliminary pool play.
The 1-2 record placed Burlington in the gold bracket for the single elimination tournament that concluded the invitational. The good news was the Huskies drew a bye in the opening round. The bad news was they were ousted by Rocky Mountain, 7-21, 18-21, in their first match and were sent packing.
Patrick said that although they are without the services of Brecka Carrizales (for the year) and Paige Neves for an indeterminate time, “We can’t blame it all on that. We need to start making some plays. We were just out of synch. It’s time for some of these other girls to take the opportunity and make something of it. We have to look at everything – the positive things.”
A good place to start looking at positives was at the service line where the Lady Huskies served 92 percent. Michelle Fabricius was 12 of 12 with two aces, and Alysia Henderson, 23 of 23 with four aces. Also perfect from the stripe were Esmerelda Zubia, Jessica Flores and Alanna Powers.
On the negative side were the 61 attacking errors. “That has to be some kind of record,” Patrick said. “We struggled with our attacking consistency. We only hit 70 percent of our attacks in bounds.” Another problem was with the pass as the coach explained, “We had 26 serve-receive errors.” Between the serve-receive errors and 16 “non-playable errors,” that was 42 serve receives we did not handle.”
Sadie Nicholson did have 10 kills followed by Powers with seven kills and 21 digs and Fabricius has five stuff blocks to go with 19 digs.
Getting back to the bright spots, Patrick said, “We did some nice things out there – they just didn’t work. Just too many errors. In volleyball you have to touch (hopefully) that ball three times, and they have to be good touches. We just are not able to do that right now.”
He is still happy with his team. “They are keeping their heads up and playing hard. Things just are not going good for them right now; that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way.”