Good Saturday Afternoon Everyone!
I just wanted to send a Week 1 update on the Lady Wildcats. I am sure it would help the voters for each coach to post a weekly or some sort of update as the season progresses. You can look at scores in MaxPreps all you want, but that does not always tell the whole story:
I knew that our team needed some early challenges to become the team we want to be in October. So we scheduled 4A Greater Neuse River defending conference champion Corinth Holders for our first match!
We started out in complete control of the match as we won the first set in 4 of the 6 singles matches and our #1 on that day Kolleen Tyndall had the lead on the Lady Pirates #1 Ryan Moreland of Corinth 5-4 in the first set. Things went unfortunately south from there as the 120+ degree Wendell heat seemed to start affecting my young ladies more than our opponents. Now we run and practice in the heat, but something about that day was different for my young ladies. I have to give credit to Coach Lee and her Corinth Holders Lady Pirates as they certainly battled and were about to pull out all 2 of the 3+ hour 3rd set tie breakers and her #1 Ryan Moreland came back and won a 2 1/2 hour marathon 7-5, 7-5 match. So what started out looking like a 5-1 lead for us heading into doubles ended up the absolute opposite, as Corinth led 4-2 heading into doubles. Most of my top 6 were mentally and physically exhausted, hot, disappointed, and felt they let me down. I told them NO way, I thought they played really well, but as a team we HAVE to learn how to "finish" singles matches.
We moved on to doubles after a break, in which Corinth's home court advantage was evident as they had a room set up with fans, snacks, water, and out of the sun! The #1 Lady Pirates doubles team of Davis/Hearn played lights out and won easily 8-1. The #2 doubles match was very competitive and we even held a 4-3 lead but Kolleen & Nadia fell 8-6. My #3 doubles team of Emily Buckler & Elly Jens played absolutely awesome and were able to capture the win 8-1! But this was a very good learning experience for my new team and they will certainly learn from it!
Our other scheduled match at home against defending 4A All American Conference Champion Pine Forest was moved to later in the season, so we only were able to play one match during week 1. But on a side note, as you can see in MaxPreps, Corinth Holders had to play Wake Forest the next day, Thursday 8/17. The Lady Pirates ended up losing a heartbreaking 5-4 match in which there were 2 three setters and a close match at #4. I have to think that our match the day before had to have a huge affect on that match and the loss!
Coach Jay James, West Johnston Lady Wildcats
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