The Lady Trojans had their home opener against the Sierra Vista Mountain Lions, which was their first league game. The match went four games with the Trojans losing 3-1.
The Trojans dropped the first game, which was not even close, 12-25 and then woke up in the second game and won 25-21. The Trojans failed to take advantage of Bridgette Levi, Sierra Vista’s best player (5-foot-11), missing the first game due to an allergic reaction, which had her breaking out in hives. This delayed the start of the game almost 30 minutes, which was already delayed by the junior varsity game starting late. Levi returned in the second game and almost rallied her team to victory.
All through the night the Trojans had problems serving and had numerous side-outs caused by bad serves. In a bold coaching move at the end of the second game, Trojans Coach Jill Harris brought in a serving specialist, senior Taylor Kingsley. Kingsley came in cold off the bench and served for Shayla Dance. She finished the match and won it with her steady nerves and serves.
The Trojans kept battling in the third game and overcame an early 4-point lead midway through the match and tied the game at 6-6. They fell behind again to 9-13 but slowly came back to within one point, 22-23, but lost the game on a bad serve, 23-25.
After the third game, the Trojans couldn’t push it to a fifth one. Sierra Vista played nearly perfect ball in the fourth and easily won it 25-14. In the end, the hard hitting senior Sydney Land (No. 11) for Sierra Vista was just too much for the Trojans defense.
Sierra Vista Coach Camille McComas was satisfied with her team’s win. “I am hoping we are vying for a top position in this division. Every time we come here you have an extremely scrappy team. We have to work on our patience. Pahrump did a nice job of giving us the ball over and over. Your coach does a good job with the program. Every time we meet I feel we learn something about ourselves. We need to improve day after day and the girls are a good group, who are working hard towards that goal,” the coach said.
Trojans Coach Jill Harris was disappointed in her team’s serving. “We had to serve better. We can’t be missing five serves and let them have four aces right away. Game three it was four aces right away. Game one it was four aces too. Seriously — we can’t give up four points like that, we got to fight and then we miss five serves — that’s nine points. We did not focus on our serves at all,” Harris said in frustration.
The Trojans fall to 4-5 overall and 0-1 in league play. Their next game is next Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Spring Valley.
They don’t come home until Sept. 22 at 6 p.m. against Mojave.