The Sandy Valley Sidewinders aren’t the roll-over team from last year and gave the Muckers a run for their money. The Sidewinders volleyball team visited Tonopah last week on Friday and were 2-0 going into the meet with some major improvements offensively since last year. They easily beat Beaver Dam 3-0 and then beat Adelson school, 3-0, too.
Tack on the fact that Coach Harvey Gonzalez’ Muckers had a bad day serving and you have yourself a tight volleyball game where the Muckers hung on every match, but won 3-1 (25-18, 21-25, 25-22, 25-15).
Gonzalez would be the first to admit his team did not have an easy time of it.
“Sandy Valley has improved immensely,” he said. “My girls said they really improved since last year. My girls were not playing very well. Our serving stats were atrocious. There were a couple of fundamental errors that we picked up that I was seeing. We started correcting them in practice. Our serving was not where it should be. We were hitting a lot and they were digging a lot. They were quite an impressive defensive team.”
Gonzalez and the Muckers spent the week working on the mistakes committed against SV and hope to have all the issues worked out in time for Round Mountain on Friday evening. He said his team had the problems with the serving during the second match and the girls need practice hitting certain spots. He said he calls a lot of the serves. He said this area needs more consistency.
“When it is all said and done it was still a victory and we will take it, but there is some improvement there,” he said.
The Muckers are on the road and then return for a Saturday game against Sierra Lutheran at 1 p.m. The Sierra game is a non-league game, which will be used to work on all the issues from the Sandy Valley game.
“I am proud of them because they didn’t lay down and they kept fighting. So I am proud of them for that, but there is still a lot of work to do,” he said.
Round Mountain is 0-1 in league play and hard-pressed for a win.