Juneau-Douglas High School volleyball will have to wait to get their first wins of the season as the Crimson Bears lost their first two games this weekend at Nome-Beltz High School.<\/p>\n
JDHS lost 3-1 on Friday night and 3-2 Saturday afternoon. The Crimson Bears are still figuring out rotations in the early season, and in front of a rowdy home crowd in Nome — seemingly the whole town showed up for the games, senior Leah Spargo said — JDHS was outmatched.<\/p>\n
“We’re still tyring to figure out exactly where everyone is going to be, we have a couple new players this year and they’re getting used to the whole rotation thing. But other than trying new stuff, I think the team did super, super well,” Spargo said.<\/p>\n
Ball placement and fundamentals came through, Spargo said, but their success was inconsistent in their first matches.<\/p>\n
“We have streaks of really strong passing, setting and hitting, just the whole thing, but sometimes we go down a little bit. … We just need to keep it at a constant level,” Spargo said.<\/p>\n
On Friday, JDHS split their first two games with the Nanooks, but Nome-Beltz took the last two to win. Assistant Coach Dale Bontrager said home team jumped on the rusty visitors right away.<\/p>\n
“They pretty much waxed us in the first game,” Bontrager said.<\/p>\n
After shaking the first-game jitters off, JDHS then warmed up enough to take a game back.<\/p>\n
“By the end of the second game, we were really getting them. We were playing a lot better defense, reading their hitters better,” Bontrager said.<\/p>\n
But JDHS couldn’t sustain that success as Nome-Beltz took the next two games.<\/p>\n
“We had some stretches of brilliance, and we had some stretches of not-brilliance. But through it all their energy is positive, they stayed up,” Bontrager said.<\/p>\n
Juneau teams don’t normally travel to Nome. Both Bontrager and Spargo said the trip was a good opportunity to experience Alaska culture while sharpening their skills against a tough, defensive team. The team went for a tour of the town and viewed some muskox during the trip. <\/p>\n
After taking next weekend off, JDHS will have a chance to record their first win at games against Sitka and Mount Edgecumbe High Schools on Sept. 8 and 9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juneau-Douglas High School volleyball will have to wait to get their first wins of the season as the Crimson Bears lost their first two games this weekend at Nome-Beltz High School. JDHS lost 3-1 on Friday night and 3-2 Saturday afternoon. The Crimson Bears are still figuring out rotations in the early season, and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":25879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-25878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25878"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}