No small games

Creamline hasn’t shown any signs that it plans to vacate the Premier Volleyball League (PVL) throne anytime soon.

The key to the Cool Smashers’ continued success? Never being satisfied and respecting whoever is on the opposite side of the net.

Just ask Alyssa Valdez.

“The coaches are telling us that we can’t be too complacent … we still have to show respect and show aggressiveness,” Valdez, a former Most Valuable Player of the league, said in Filipino.

“We still had a lot of lapses in today’s game so we’ll be hearing about it from coach [Sherwin Meneses],” she added after Creamline encountered a little fight back from winless Galeries Tower, 25-22, 25-17, 25-15 on Thursday.

The Cool Smashers face yet another unheralded and winless squad in Strong Group on March 12 and they will not change their approach as far as preparation is concerned.

Digging into bench

The approach may change in games. Against Galeries, Creamline dug deep into its bench and every player fielded managed to score a point.

“The rotation is okay. Actually every game, no matter who our opponent is, our team can maximize the rotation,” Meneses said. “We told them to perform well, to ready themselves whoever is playing inside.”But Creamline prepares in the same manner that it does when a tough matchup looms.

“Even if we don’t have an upcoming game, we still prepare. Even if we will be facing Strong Group, we will still be preparing. We focus on them first,” he said.

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“One game at a time, definitely. Coach always tell us that the opponents also play volleyball so at the end of the day we have to prepare [as hard] for every team that we will be battling,” Valdez said.Learning from its mistakes from its recent game has been the standard operating procedure for Creamline, which hiked its winning run to three in as many games in the new season after a perfect run in the previous All-Filipino Conference. The Cool Smashers’ overall win streak now stands at 18 but the competitiveness and hunger to be better remains in the seven-time champions.

“It has been a very slow and steady start for us indeed but I guess we’ll take it,” Valdez said. “We learn from every game and that’s the most important thing.”

“[The coaches] always see a lot of things that need to be corrected in us so we have to accept that this is the way that we have been playing and eventually, hopefully we get to improve more every single game,” she added. INQ