Lady Loggers drop two matches to Florence

The Lady Loggers volleyball team dropped a pair of matches in Florence on Saturday, Sept. 5.

The Loggers dropped their first match to Loyola in what was a competitive four sets. The Loggers won the first set 25-18. They then dropped the next three sets, 19-25, 18-25, and 23-25.

“I think we played strong against Loyola,” head coach, Cindy Ostrem-Johnston said. “We won the first set and I think that proved to the girls what we are capable of. We had our shot at beating them, but we got rattled after getting called for overlapping, which means we were out of rotation.”

In their next match the Lady Loggers were swept by Florence. The Lady Loggers lost 14-25, 12-25 and 13-25.

“Florence is just a dang good team,” she said. “They are a solid team. They had an outside hitter they we couldn’t stop. We couldn’t do anything against her. Florence is a legit team and we didn’t compete very well. The combination of those two things explains the scores.”

Serve receiving is an area in which Ostrem-Johnston said her team needs to improve moving forward.

 “We need to do a better job at getting the ball to the setter,” she said. “We are really struggling with our serve receiving. We will be working on that in practice a lot this week and moving forward. We will break it down with passing drills. Then we do serve receiving drills.”

The Lady Loggers are a young and an inexperienced team. Ostrem-Johnston said her team will go through growing pains this season.

“We are an inexperienced team,” she said. “Even my seniors are not experienced varsity players. It’s a whole new team this season. It’s going to take a while to work the kinks out. We are a young team. I anticipated we’d struggle at the beginning of the season. We will hopefully get better each game and we will look to improve and compete each game.”

Next up for the Lady Loggers is a double-header this Saturday, Sept. 12, in Ronan.

“We play in Ronan on Saturday,” she said. “It’s a double-header with Ronan and Deer Lodge. Hopefully we will show big improvement from the way we played last weekend. We need to do a better job of controlling things. Our serve percentage needs to be higher. We were at 86 and 81 percent last weekend. The main thing is our serve receiving. If we can do a better job at passing to the setter we can better utilize our hitters. I’m hoping we compete better. I was disappointed in the way we competed last weekend.”