One night after defeating the #11 ranked Sonoma State Seawolves for their biggest win of the season, the CSU East Bay volleyball team lost Sunday in the annual Battle of the Bay game against the San Francisco State Gators (9-10, 4-7 CCAA) in straight sets.
With the loss, the Pioneers (7-12, 3-8 CCAA)have lost seven of their last eight and are now 10th in the CCAA Women’s Volleyball standings.
Head Coach Jim Spagle has a simple message on how he thinks his team can start playing better.
“Compete,” said Spagle who was clearly upset after the loss. “Somebody punches you in the nose you have one of two options; you can look for a rock to climb under or you can drop your gloves and start getting it on, last night we did that. We competed, we fought, we went toe to toe with, in my opinion, the best volleyball team in the conference and came out on top. Tonight we didn’t do that.”
The first set started off well for the Pioneers before the Gators rallied back and took the set 27-25. The second set was very close until, once again, the Gators closed the set with authority winning 25-21. The Gators closed out the Pioneers in the third set 25-19. While statistically the game was close, the Gators seemed to be in control throughout.
“We are playing timid, playing not to lose volleyball versus assertive aggressive play to win style volleyball,” said Spagle. “Very timid on the court. We have some very simplistic systems we run both offensively and defensively. There were too many opportunities for San Francisco State, we were out of those systems and they were able to attack our defense much easier due to that.”
Spagle quickly dismissed whether or not fatigue played a factor after the five set, hard fought win the night before, but did think there was a big reason why the Pioneers lost.
“They are collegiate athletes,” said Spagle. “They are in great shape. Their condition is superb. Mentally their focus wasn’t quite there. That I will say and when your focus isn’t quite 100 percent, errors start popping up and that happened this evening. Too many lack of focus errors, mental errors; physically we should have been fine.”
After back-to-back home games, the Pioneers will now head back out on the road where they have yet to win a game; going winless in five tries.
Senior Katie Allen thinks that the mental side of the game and lack of teamwork has contributed to the team’s struggles this season.
“We don’t play as a team a lot of times,” said Allen. “If we are down one game, our confidence goes down. So we are struggling with thinking that we can come back and finish a game and that we can do better in the other games.”
This sense of discouragement has contributed to the Pioneers’ trouble of stringing wins together, having yet to win back-to-back CCAA games this season.
With 11 games left in the season and just five games under .500, the Pioneers can certainly turn it around and Allen thinks she knows how.
“We have to do things in practice where we are having more fun and can play as a team and realize that we can win,” said Allen. “When we are doing well we have to build on it. We need to not think ‘oh we lost the first game and we cant win the next couple games.”
Much like Allen, Spagle believes this season can be turned around. Spagle said they need to go back to how they practice and just try to start with the next game.
“Get back to doing fundamentals,” said Spagle. “Get back to working hard, success follows effort. We need to work hard in practice. Get back into our systems of play and just take it one day at a time.”
