Hornets put it all together in sweep against Round Mountain

Going into Saturday’s match at Beatty, the Round Mountain and Beatty high school girls volleyball teams had very different mindsets.

The Hornets were coming off of a rough outing against Pahranagat Valley, while the Knights played well in a loss against undefeated Virginia City.

But none of that carried over into Saturday, as the Hornets looked sharp most of the day during a 3-0 sweep of the Knights.

For Beatty coach Steve Sullivan, despite the loss Friday, the result was part of an overall trend of improvement he has seen from his team.

“It’s no longer about the physical aspect of it, it’s about the mental aspect,” Sullivan said. “It’s kind of hard sometimes when there’s no playoffs, there’s nothing to look forward to. I think it took us a while to realize that the motivation’s got to be that we’re playing.

“And we need to enjoy that. It doesn’t matter if there’s playoffs, state, trophy, whatever. For you seniors, you want to be the best you can be before you leave.”

Sullivan said he saw it come together the previous weekend.

“Green Valley (Christian) we lost in that third set, but against Tonopah we didn’t,” he said of that tri-match. “They stuck it out. We lost it (Friday) against Alamo. I just felt confident going in, but their reputation precedes them. And the girls knew it. We could just not get in sync, we could not get in rhythm.”

But the Hornets turned that around against Round Mountain. They were playing so well that even a short series of weak points prompted Sullivan to call timeout when the Hornets left the second set 19-15.

“I think at this point we should not be having a lack of communication, and that tends to happen,” he said. “It’s an easy aspect of the game to forget. When you have six girls out there and everyone’s moving and the ball’s flying back and forth, you need those verbal cues to signal each other’s minds, signal the team. … We were just making mental errors, and we weren’t communicating.”

“Then the second thing is we weren’t running bump, set, spike. We weren’t running offense, we were just getting the ball back over. Round Mountain, based on what I’ve seen so far and what I know about them from the past couple of years, they are not the type of team you can let up on. That’s what I was telling the girls. You’ve got to run the offense, you’ve got to keep up the pressure.”

When the Knights are at their best, that is certainly the case. But for whatever reason, Saturday was not on of those days.

“They seemed out of it today, very out of it,” Round Mountain coach Anna Berg said. “We were off, really a team effort. I think they all kind of fed off of each other today. They didn’t cover. They just let the ball fall between them.”

Part of the secret for the Hornets is a very simple lesson of volleyball: Power is useful but not always necessary.

“Our kills do not have to be 100 miles per hour,” Sullivan said. “Read the defense, get them moving, keep the pressure on them. You can swing as much as you want, but every once in a while do a roll shot, do a tip, hit a line, hit shallow, hit off the block, all that stuff.”

The Knights will get another crack at the Hornets when the teams meet again at 4 p.m. Saturday, this time in Round Mountain.