Friday, October 24, 2008

Panthers Blank Plymouth State

It was the Panthers of MIDD vs. the Panthers of Plymouth State in our last home game in the Bubble....ever! It's been a great facility for us, actually, and I think we gave it a decent farewell, even though we'll continue to practice in there. We started off very strong, which was nice to see as we haven't always done that this year. We served them tough, and got some great hits from the OH early on. Even though we served well, we also gave up an early string of points to them to neutralize the lead we had just built. After exchanging points, we then took control of the tempo again, and started to put them away. We knew that their offense was mostly run through the middle, and they couldn't get their passes up early to be able to run middle, and we capitalized on that. We were dictating the tempo for the most part, which is what we wanted to do.

Their defense stabilized a bit in the second game, and we made some unforced errors, in addition to not taking care of junk balls that they gave us, and thus we weren't able to keep the pressure on them like we wanted. This allowed them to run the middle more, which gave us some trouble at first. Eventually, we started to block that hit, and also dig it more successfully, and thus ran off with the last game fairly easily. The good news for us in the 2nd game was that we came from behind to win that game. We were down 19-22, and came back to tie it at 23, and won it 25-23. We looked calm, and confident which is exactly how we need to be at this point in the season.

We're off to the Hall of Fame Tournament this weekend, and then our last four matches of the season are all Conference Matches!! Senior Night we'll be back in Pepin--Hooray!! We're very excited, as our destiny is completely in our own hands! That's certainly the position you want to be in at this stage!

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