FREMONT – Forget moral victories, they don’t exist. But if there is such thing as a loss to feel good about, the Ross volleyball team got one Thursday.
The Lady Giants dropped the first two sets to TRAC rival Whitmer but rallied back. Ross won the next two sets to force a fifth set, before falling short, 3-2 by scores of 21-25, 18-25, 25-12, 25-21, 7-15.
“I think the team I walked in to at the beginning of July would have given up after the first two sets,” first-year coach Kari Shull said. “And they kept pushing and fixed the things I asked them to fix and they did those things very well in sets 3 and 4.
“Unfortunately, in set 5 we were slow out of the gate doing that and when you’re playing to 15 you just don’t have enough time to catch up.”
Ross dug itself into the two-set hole with sloppy passing. The Lady Giants’ corrected the problem and found its offense to battle back. Shull said the slow start in the fifth set was not a case of running of out gas, rather just good play by Whitmer.
“I just think Whitmer is a solid team and had some nice hitters, they’re scrappy and that ball is going to keep going back over,” Shull said. “I don’t think we ran out of gas, we just struggled to pass in that fifth set. Which is what we struggled with the first set and the second set.”
Olivia DeRodes led the attack with 12 kills and five blocks while Olivia Baptista added eight kills. Jazmin Bulger had four blocks and three aces as Ross’ record dipped to 3-7 overall, 1-2 in the TRAC.
“I told them I was super proud of them and not to lose faith and keep chugging along,” Shull said. “Volleyball is a game of inches and centimeters. So when we’re missing some of those shots we’re aiming for by a few inches or a foot, those are the differences between the ball coming back or not.”