Fanshawe’s Men’s volleyball team didn’t start in the way they wanted too.
The Falcons were swept in three straight sets against the Red Deer Kings in the opening day of the National Championships.
The Falcons starting the game strong feeding off the hostile crowd. Unfortunately, the Falcons would later struggle to capitalize on their serves, that would prove to be one of the biggest factors in the game. “They were serving pretty tough, and we weren’t, they were passing well and we weren’t passing as well” said Falcon’s outside hitter David Aucoin.
Head coach Patrick Johnston had this to say about all the missed serves “there were defiantly some nerves because we don’t normally miss that many serves, 15 (misses) in three sets, and we are not going to beat Red Deer if we miss that many serves.”
The Glenn Johnston Athletic Centre was packed with majority wearing red, cheering on their Falcons that could have been too much pressure on last years bronze medal team but that wasn’t what David Aucoin was saying “I tried to stress to the guys that the crowd is there for support not pressure, and playing in front of this many people doesn’t happen to often and only when your lucky.”
Fanshawe falls to the Red Deer Kings 3 sets to none as the defending champions will move on to the winners round. #CCAAmvb2017 pic.twitter.com/w8C3C3FpgH
— XFM Sports (@SportsXFM) March 10, 2017
After the game, you can feel the disappointment on the Falcon’s team faces, but Aucoin knows what they have to do to overcome this loss “The best thing we can is forget about this, nothing we can do about it now and tactically we can serve a little better.”
Patrick Johnston had this to say after the game “Disappointing, the crowd was amazing, wish we could still be playing right now and give them something to cheer about, it’s just disappointing that we couldn’t execute on stuff we talked about for two weeks” and also adds that crowd might have gotten to them “it was a fun day for them, perhaps too much fun, many of them haven’t played in a crowd this big which could have made get caught up in that moment.”
David Aucoin sees some positive light about this outcome “I’m a pretty positive guy, so I’m just we still get to fight, I’m happy to see how we rebound off this, I’m not happy about the loss, but I’m happy to see us grow and how we play tomorrow.”
The Falcons will now play their conference rivals the Mohawk Mountaineers at 3 pm today. Fanshawe played Mohawk twice during regular season play, first at home when Mohawk beat them 3-2, then Fanshawe would later sweep them in three sets at Mohawk.
When asked about Mohawk, Aucoin had this to say “A team like that, we need to want to win more than them, they like to get under your skin and they play pretty well, if we aren’t up to the challenge they are gonna have fun.”
