Frontier Regional School girls’ volleyball coach Sean MacDonald said it’s not his team’s goal to be undefeated during the season. The Red Hawks only want to be undefeated in November.
The team played the kind of match Saturday that might help make that happen.
The Red Hawks had a woeful hitting day and it came back to bite them as they fell to Melrose High School, 25-15, 23-25, 25-17, 25-23 in an independent home match.
Frontier finished with a negative hitting number through three sets, according to MacDonald. That means the team had more hitting errors than it did kills.
“We had a negative hitting percentage through the first three sets, so I don’t even know how we played a fourth,” MacDonald said. “We would do some good things, but then we would stop our own momentum. It was kind of frustrating. Melrose is a good team, and that’s why we scheduled them, but it felt like everything I did as a coach was just not working.”
The loss dropped Frontier to 5-2 overall on the season. MacDonald said that his team will use the loss as a way to identify and work on things in practice.
“These are the matches that if you have an issue, something that might be described as a weakness or flaw, it will get exposed,” he explained. “It’s September 24. We have almost two months to work on these things and try to accomplish our goal of playing on November 18 in the state finals. If we take something away from this and learn, it’s worth it.”
Lauren Davenport finished with 12 kills, 15 digs and three aces for Frontier, while Selayna Bathurst had 11 kills and nine digs. Ella Deane had 33 assists and 13 digs, and Bri Thurber had 15 digs and one ace. Ashley Telega had eight kills and seven digs, and Grace Randall had four kills, three digs and one ace.
“Melrose is a good team,” MacDonald concluded. “They didn’t make a lot of mistakes, and defensively they were pretty strong. They have a good setter, and they run a lot of their offense out of the middle. We are not a really tall team, so we’re not going to block too many shots. In the end, we made too many errors.”
Frontier travels to Longmeadow High School on Tuesday.
Dutkiewicz Memorial
Carsten Carey’s victory helped the Frontier boys’ cross country win the Boys’ Division II race during the Ted Dutkiewicz Memorial Cross Country Race at East Longmeadow High School on Saturday.
Carey won the race in 14 minutes, 52.91 seconds to easily outpace Daniel Markey from Pope Francis High School, who finished second in 15:22.20. Frontier’s Peter Carey came in fourth overall in 15:38.49, and Ben Litskoski was ninth overall in 16:41.51. Daniel Dejnak was 11th in 16:51.03, and George Tsaplin was 15th in 17:35.29.
The Frontier girls’ finished fourth in the Division II race. Greyson Young led the Red Hawks with a 17th-place finish in 20:29.86, while Fiona Ferry came in right behind her in 18th in 20:33.87.
Mohawk Trail Regional High School’s Meghan Davis was second overall in the race in 16:24.72, but the Warriors did not score as a team.