Volleyball Creams Choate, Falls to NMH
Last Saturday, Exeter boys’ volleyball traveled to Choate, where they competed against Choate and NMH. Big Red battled hard and beat Choate 3-0, winning each set 27-25, 25-10 and 25-22. The team fell short against NMH, however, losing 3-1 with set scores of 21-25, 18-25, 25-15 and 19-25.
Although the game was tough, Big Red took away some positives it hopes to use to benefit the rest of its season. “We learned a lot about ourselves on Saturday and will hopefully use our knowledge to improve,” upper Max Kirsch explained.
Senior Hugh O’Neil agreed. “NMH was a challenge,” he said. “Their athleticism and frankly their height was too much for us this time.” In addition to the other teams’ strengthens, O’Neil also cited some areas in which Exeter could improve.
“In practice this week we are going to be working on our serves and our setting, so we can come out strong and beat PA and Wilbraham and Monson next week.”
“We had a lot of service errors early in the game, which caused us to lose our flow in some instances. We ended up winning one set when the team started coming together and things started to click, but again, our mistakes slowed us down.”
Nonetheless, Exeter remains optimistic becase “we have shown that we can beat NMH, and we know we can do it again. It just wasn’t our day,” O’Neil said.
Prep Noah Asch agreed with O’Neil. “The past proves that we have what it takes to beat NMH. We dug ourselves into a hole early—each point we lost frustrated us and took away from our momentum, [but] we play NMH again in two weeks and hope to beat,” Asch said.
Against Choate, however, O’Neil said Big Red played better once the team had settled down. “We came out a little bit startled in the first set,” he said. “This was our second time playing against Choate, so we thought we knew what to expect, [but] Choate surprised us—they showed a lot of improvement since their first game against us (Exeter won 3-0). We almost lost the first set (27-25), but after we won [that set] we calmed down. Once we settled in, we won the next two sets without a problem.”
Knowing NMH’s and Choate’s strengths, the team now has a better idea of what to expect going forward. “In practice this week we are going to be working on our serves and our setting, so we can come out strong and beat PA and Wilbraham and Monson next week,” O’Neil said.
Big Red plays in a double header at PA next Saturday at 3:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. The boys will play against PA and Wilbraham and Monson, and they hope to take their current record from 4-1 to 6-1.