Volleyball: Odessa High loses opportunity to pick up win on season's first day

The Odessa High volleyball team had El Paso Coronado reeling.

The Lady Bronchos simply needed to finish the job, take home a single set and they could salvage an opening day that had gotten off to a sluggish start.

El Paso Coronado came roaring back. Behind the outside hitting of Rosie Diaz, El Paso Coronado knocked off Odessa High 16-25, 16-25, 25-15, 25-14, 17-15 to hand the Lady Bronchos their second loss of the season’s opening day.

The Lady Bronchos got blasted by El Paso Chapin 25-19, 25-14, 25-15 in their season opener at the OHS Fieldhouse.

“The second match was better than the first,” OHS head coach Linda McMillan said. “We still are not consistent at all. We get down on ourselves, and it took us three or four points to come back from setbacks.”

Odessa High (0-2) played well in spurts, but the Lady Bronchos kept allowing opponents to break off the kinds of long, unanswered scoring runs that can kill a volleyball team.

Against El Paso Chapin (2-0), the Lady Bronchos forced a 14-14 tie in the first set, then allowed the Lady Huskies to break off an 8-0 run and take control. In the second, Odessa High made it to the same point before allowing El Paso Chapin to score 11 unanswered points and close out the set.

“We have to have seniors step up and stop those kind of five, six, seven-point runs,” McMillan said. “I’ve got to have somebody on the floor take over.”

Odessa High looked like a different team at the start of its match against El Paso Coronado (0-2).

Sparked by backup setter Adrianna Rivas and outside hitter Victoria Smith, the Lady Bronchos rolled through the Lady Thunderbirds 25-16, 25-16 to start off their first chance at redemption.

Set up by Rivas, Smith slammed down eight kills in the second set alone and finished with a team-high 15 kills.

“You can never let a game go like that,” senior hitter Kerri Haenelt said. “It’s all mental. You can’t beat a team two games and not have the ability to finish the third one.”

Except that the Lady Bronchos lost their bearings.

After racking up 11 kills in the first two sets, Smith only had four the rest of the way. Finding opportunities for Haenelt, a dangerous hitter who had 10 kills, came few and far between.

And the Lady Bronchos’ inability to serve-receive consistently led to easy opportunities for the El Paso Coronado attack, an attack that only had to get the ball to star outside hitter Rosie Diaz.

Diaz finished with a match-high 24 kills, including four straight in the fifth and final set that erased a momentum-turning kill by Rivas and tied the score at 11.

After that, El Paso Coronado held off one last charge by the Lady Bronchos, then finished them with a well-placed ace that landed behind Odessa High’s beleaguered defense.

“We’re still getting used to the whole thing,” Smith said. “When we’re beside people we don’t know, we don’t know how they’re going to react, so we need to learn each other better.”

And find somebody who can step up when things get bad.