The Westlock Thunderbirds senior boys volleyball walked away from a Spruce Grove tournament with a silver medal after narrowly falling to Barrhead in the finals.
Coach Steve McKenna said even though the T-Birds lost that final match, the boys can hold their heads high — it was a spectacular effort on the part of both teams in the final of the St. Paul the Apostle School tournament.
“On our side, it was mostly mental mistakes,” he said. “We took the first game, then stopped playing our game. Unfortunately Barrhead picked up their game, and we just couldn’t match it.”
That first game went in favour of Westlock by a 25-20 margin, before Barrhead took an early lead and bested the T-Birds 25-19 in the second. Westlock struggled to regain the upper hand, ultimately losing the deciding game 15-10.
“At the end of the day, what happened is we just stopped being aggressive. In the first game we were hitting, we were attacking, and in games two and three we went away from that; we went away from our own game. That was the difference,” McKenna said.
Prior to the final, however, the T-Birds went undefeated. They worked their way through the opposition, earning a bye to the semi-final round, where they delivered a sound thrashing to a team from Camrose.
“We came out just fired up. I mean, that game there alone, the boys played some spectacular ball. Because of that, we defeated them quite handily,” he said.
The defeat in the final wasn’t as disappointing as it might have been, given the high quality of play both teams put forth.
McKenna said the tournament was also a really good indication of what kind of challenge the team will face in the zone tournaments, as most of the teams there were in the same 3A North Central Zone.
The team will have a chance to take a break this weekend for Thanksgiving, before getting right back at it next weekend, heading north to a tournament in Athabasca.
“It’s a good chance for everybody to kind of recharge and get refocused,” McKenna said.
“As much as the boys love tournament ball, they could use a break too.”
