The opening match of the 2019 season had only one negative for the Pojoaque Valley High School volleyball players.
Amid the Elkettes dominant 3-0 (25-14, 25-16, 25-15) sweep of Albuquerque’s Sandia Prep on Aug. 29 at Ben Luján Gymnasium, it was three service errors that stood out to Pojoaque senior captain Ashten Martinez and the rest of the group.
“We’ll have to pay for it and run five sets of stairs at practice,” Martinez said laughing.
Typically, Pojoaque head coach Joe Rodriguez assigns his team a set of stairs for each missed serve, and although there were only three errors, somehow the players came up with the punishment of five.
“Five is what you guys said,” Rodriguez told Martinez and libero Mikayla Padilla with a smile. “So, let’s make it six now.”
All jokes aside, serving is always the name of the game for Rodriguez and the Elkettes, and their season-opening effort of 95.9 percent on 73 total serves helped set the precedent of the match, leaving the Lady Sundevils’ (0-2) back row helpless on many occasions.
Pojoaque totaled eight aces in all, and the triplet of Padilla, Ayanna Aguirre and Adrianna Rodriguez accounted for two apiece.
“I think serving helps us a lot (in building momentum),” Padilla said. “That’s the one part of the game we can control.”
The senior libero recorded both of her aces in the first set, where Pojoaque made it quickly known that quick sets to the middle would be its bread-and-butter to score points and terminate play. Martinez was atop the stat column with fellow middle Leah Trujillo, as both had eight kills apiece to lead the Elkettes.
“That’s what we were planning on doing,” coach Rodriguez said about the offense. “We have two of the better middle hitters in the state, if not Northern New Mexico. When we can get our middle hitters going like that, that opens up room for everyone else.”
The two middles carried the load and Aguirre, Espy Torres and Alicia Quintana complemented with two kills apiece of the team’s 23 total.
“We were able to set the defense off guard a lot of the night,” Martinez said. “When we’re quicker, they’re not ready for it. The energy was really good tonight, and even when we got down or lost a point, the energy was still there and brought us back up.”
It was very rare for Pojoaque to get down or lose momentum throughout the duration of the match. After the game 1 win, the Elkettes opened the second set right where they left off, jumping out to a 4-0 lead and increasing the margin to 12-4 before Sandia head coach Gi Taik Hong was forced to call a timeout.
The closest the Lady Sundevils would cut into the lead in the second set would be at 17-11, and Martinez stole back any positive feelings Sandia Prep gained after a huge kill from the middle, and that was followed by an ace by Adrianna Rodriguez.
Sandia Prep’s Petra Fritz committed a hitting error on the next sequence, and as the deficit for the Lady Sundevils grew to 20-11, Pojoaque wasted no time in ending the set.
The third set had much of the same storyline, as Pojoaque hopped out to a 9-4 lead to force a Hong timeout – which had little to no effect on the psyche of his players. The Elkettes stormed out of the timeout and forced Hong to stop play again when they increased their lead to 23-10 before finishing off the sweep.
Coach Rodriguez credited the tempo his team played with as for the reason why Sandia Prep looked lost on the court on several occasions throughout the match.
“They run a lot of high sets and high passes, but we played with speed,” he said. “We played uptempo and everything in our practice is uptempo too; from water breaks to dressing out. We’re never walking around and we always emphasize tempo.”
Other positives the second-year head coach noted was the play from Aguirre in her first match as the starting setter (24 assists), the block up front against Sandia’s big hitters and the ability to sub younger players into the rotation.
“We certainly had some pregame jitters, me included,” coach Rodriguez said. “They were nervous, and half of the team was first time playing varsity, so they did very well, actually.”
Pojoaque played host to Robertson High School on Tuesday in their second match of the season, but those results were not available by press time. The Elkettes travel to Albuquerque for a road match against Del Norte at 6 p.m., Thursday (9/5).