COULD BE BETTER
La Salle assistant coach Noel Orcullo did not hide the disappointment of the coaching staff over how the Lady Spikers strung up their first back-to-back victories in the UAAP Season 87 women’s volleyball tournament.
“Firstly, it’s not a good game result,” Orcullo said after the Lady Spikers allowed winless University of the East to clinch a set before finally taking the game, 25-12, 23-25, 25-14, 25-17, on Saturday at Mall of Asia Arena.
“Although we won, that wasn’t what we wanted to see from them. We already had the lead in the second set but the players relaxed,” Orcullo said. “It’s like they did not respect UE and they just waited for them to commit mistakes or give up.”
As one of the more successful programs here, La Salle is having an uncharacteristic start to its campaign.
And so even with the victory that lifted La Salle, who was dethroned early last year, to a 3-2 (win-loss) record, head coach Ramil de Jesus was not expecting his wards to surrender a set to the bottom-dwelling Lady Warriors.
“That’s why coach [Ramil] was getting mad. We were already there but we let go when we were in the endgame,” Orcullo said.
As a result of the “disappointing” game, Orcullo hinted that the team would immediately get back to work to fix what went wrong.
And he might have meant that literally.
The Lady Spikers, who hurriedly left the Pasay venue after the game, have a reputation for going back to training right after bad losses and it seems like they would be treating this result as such.
Solid contributions
“The result isn’t good like what coach said, so might as well go back to Razon,” Orcullo said referring to the team’s training gym back in their Taft campus.
Angel Canino finished with 20 points made up of 14 attacks, three blocks and the same number of aces, highlighted by 10 excellent digs and nine excellent receptions.
Alleiah Malaluan helped with 12 points, all but one from kills, Jyne Soreño made the most out of her playing time with 12 points, nine coming in the third set, and Amie Provido added 11 points.
Mikole Reyes executed her playmaking duties well with 23 excellent sets while Libero Lyka De Leon did her part on the defense with high efficiency 17 excellent digs out of 28 attempts and 16 excellent receptions out of just 25 attempts.
“Our errors were evident, especially in the second set,” Canino said. “So we really need to work on that and like what we say, we can’t relax regardless of the result of the previous set. We should still be all out and give our opponent respect.”
“I always remind them in those situations to ‘Wake up. We are in a game now so we need everyone’s all-out effort,’” she added.
