Cobras looking for consistency

Through the early part of the season, the Triton volleyball team was showing flashes of solid play, but needed to find consistency in order to have a successful season. As it hits the halfway point of the season, that hasn’t surfaced, and the Cobras seem to be heading in the wrong direction after losses to Goodhue and Lourdes last week.
“A lot of it is mental focus and consistency,” head coach Rebecca Goossens explained. “But it’s energy as well. Do we start and maintain high energy throughout practice? Do we have that during our warm up? Can we get past a mistake? It’s things like that.”
Triton had an opportunity to use some home crowd energy as they hosted their homecoming match against Goodhue on Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the Cobras couldn’t generate any success and fell in three straight games. Despite the loss, there were positives including Michelle Hadler’s 29 assists and 10 digs.
“We’re seeing some nice things offensively from our key players,” Goossens observed. “Alexis [Medler], Ella [Blaisdell], Gretta [Rhodes] and Jordana [Foote] have managed to stay positive on their hitting percentage for most of our matches and our setters have been able to spread it around evenly for all of those players.”
The positives seemed to bleed through into the Lourdes game on Thursday as the Cobras came out with plenty of energy en route to picking up a 25-20 victory in the first set. After that, the enthusiasm died and the Eagles won the next three games (26-24, 25-23 and 25-16) to put Triton away.
“We outplayed ourselves,” Goossens said of the loss. “We didn’t celebrate the little things and use that energy to maintain our high. Instead, we were kind of going through the motions. I thought we played well, but not with as much fire to keep pushing rather than maintaining.”
The Cobras will try to turn things around quickly as they head into the second half by opening at J-W-P on Monday before hosting Cannon Falls on Tuesday. From there, Triton will head to Zumbrota-Mazeppa to finish out the week.