Venue: West Kirby Residential School, Meols Drive, West Kirby. CH48 5DH

Time: 8:00-9:30pm

Hoylake Hurricanes v Wirral Girls

Team: Liv Stewart (capt), Natsuhi Yamamoto, Gabi Liu, Oliwia Gardaseiwicz, Ola Rys, Julia Placze, Iona West

Won 3-0, 25-17, 25-16, 25-22

First outing for this year’s U16’s and a chance to get some match practice ahead of round 1 of VE U16 GrandPrix on November 17th. 

Settling down, finding shape and system and rotation positions takes time and it was good to have a relatively weak team in Hurricanes to sort out some early season roughness. Fortunately Liv, Natsuhi and Gabi have enough experience at the core of the team to keep things on track, set a good example and take points from the opposition when required. There’s always a tendency to just play around the newcomers and this happened early in the game but the new girls got into the game more and more as the match progressed, Iona and Julia dominated the net, Ola score3d with several nice hits and served consistently, and LivG showed really good footwork and movement without always getting the best ball in from her covering libero position. 

The opposition weren’t in the same class technically or organisationally but they have a knack of getting the ball back somehow and will keep trying. Hurricanes were never in the the game in the first set and our girls felt they’d let them off the hook allowing them 17 points. Wirral started the second set on a bad serve receive run but Gabi recovered the situation with strong serving to get us back from 0-7 down and we went on to win the set 25-16. Our whole team suffered some brain-freeze issues in the third set as either complacency or lack of concentration gave away a lot of points but the win was never in doubt.

We finished with our first MVL win of the season, some valuable match practice for the new U16 squad, and some useful pointers on things we need to improve both individually and collectively.