December 14, 2024

0 and 10

The Lady Eagles traveled to Salt Lake City October 26 to take on the red-hot Lady Bruins of Salt Lake Community College. The Lady Bruins had just defeated the No. 2-ranked Northern Idaho College Cardinals a few nights before and had the CEU Eagles square in their sights.
The Lady Eagles looked flat with little offensive spark coming from anyone on the team. Usually solid Maren Ericson, Jamie King and Karina Rocha had only 16 combined kills. A bit surprising when any of these ladies can get close to16 kills on their own in any given match.

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This archived article was written by: Scott Frederick

The Lady Eagles traveled to Salt Lake City October 26 to take on the red-hot Lady Bruins of Salt Lake Community College. The Lady Bruins had just defeated the No. 2-ranked Northern Idaho College Cardinals a few nights before and had the CEU Eagles square in their sights.
The Lady Eagles looked flat with little offensive spark coming from anyone on the team. Usually solid Maren Ericson, Jamie King and Karina Rocha had only 16 combined kills. A bit surprising when any of these ladies can get close to16 kills on their own in any given match.
The rest of the scoring came from Ashlie Baker with three kills, Olivia Fowler with two, and Heather McFarland and Jennie Rudder each getting one. McFarland also led the team in assists with 18.
Defensively the team fared no better with only two-team blocks in the match, compared with SLCC’s eight.
According to Coach Brent Martindale, the Eagles got down in game one by six points so he quickly called a time out to stop the other team’s momentum and get his team refocused. After the time out the Eagles climbed back into the game but were unable to come up with a win and lost 19-30.
The second game wasn’t much of a game with the Eagles losing 16-30. In game three, the Eagles were on top 21-20 but were only able to score one more point as SLCC scored ten points, winning the game 30-22, and the match 3-0.
For the Lady Bruins it was Kris Hymas with 12 kills, Tela Burnett had nine, Talita Santos had six, and Cinthia Silva had five. Seven other Bruins had at least one kill.
Two nights later, on October 28 at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, it looked like the Lady Eagles were going to win at least one game against the No. 10-ranked Lady Cardinals. NIC dropped to No. 10 because of the previous week’s losses to SLCC. The Eagles came out firing on all cylinders and made a good game of it. The game was close the whole way with NIC edging the Eagles 30-26.
Whatever good momentum the Eagles had going in the first game died in the next two games with NIC winning easily 30-15 and 30-15. Reflecting about the last couple of matches, Martindale thinks it’s not what the other teams are doing to us, it’s what we are doing to ourselves.
On this night the Lady Eagles looked quite a bit better offensively than the previous Thursday night at SLCC. Rocha led the team with seven kills. Other players got in on the offense as well. Ericson had six kills, King had five, Baker and McFarland each had four, Fowler had two and Rudder had one.
McFarland again led the team with 18 assists. King was able to get three, Kindra Romney added two and Rudder one.
The Lady Cardinals had four players that dominated offensively. Leading the attack was Amanda Misa with 10 kills. Right behind her with nine kills was Kayla Mainer. Solid contributions also came from Cintia Alessi with six, and Daidre Mendenhall with five.
The Lady Eagles have two matches left to play this season. This coming Friday, November 3, at 7 p.m. they face the Snow College Badgers in Ephraim. The next day, Saturday November 4 at 3 p.m. they face the Badgers in Ephraim again for the last match of the year. The Badgers are fourth in the conference with a 2-7 record.