Head Coach: Lori Gragnola
Last year’s record: 1-14
Recap: The won only one league game and endured an overall record of 2-27.
Key Matchups: Milpitas, King’s Academy
Star Players: Senior Jeremy Si, Juniors Ahmed Abdullah and Anson Hulme
Key losses to graduation: Ryan Backhus, Andy Zhu
League: SCVAL Foothill League
Prognosis:
The team suffered its first league loss on March 18 in a tight 5-set match against The King’s Academy, falling short by a final score of 3-2. Earlier, the team won its first three league matches, beating Milpitas 3-1 on March 16, MacDonald 3-0 on March 11 and Santa Clara 3-1 on March 9.
The Falcons also performed well in some early preseason contests. Despite losing to Los Altos 3-0 on Feb. 23 and to Leigh 3-1 on March 10, the team went 3-1 at the Wilcox Tournament on March 14, losing to Wilcox 2-1 but beating Yerba Buena 2-0, Menlo Atherton 2-1 and Gunn 2-0.
Coming off a rough season, the team moved down a league to the SCVAL Foothill League this year. Yet, this drop has only prompted the team to train harder this year. Head coach Lori Gragnola said the team’s biggest goal is to win the leagues this year and move back to the El Camino League.
“We’re preparing (for the season) by working really hard and making our practices really rough,” Gragnola states. “We have a handful of club players that have really developed over the last year.”
The team trains three days a week and has games on the remaining two. During off-season, many players stayed closely connected by playing club. The team’s setters, sophomore Owen Su and junior Lawerence He, did a lot of training together for club during offseason by working on consistency.
During practice, the team has been focusing on fundamental skills such as serve-receive as well as back row hitting.
“We’ve been working on getting a clean game,” senior captain Jeremy Si said. “Just pass, set, hit — those are the skills that we are working on.”
Additionally, this year, due to a shortage of players at tryouts, the JV team was disbanded and was instead replaced by a practice team. This team is much smaller in scale but is able to attend all the practices alongside varsity. They are also expected to go to all of the home games and referee some of them. Gragnola hopes to play some of the players during tournaments, which are usually long and tiring for a team.
“Since starting practices, our teamwork has gotten better and everyone got their touches back,” Si said. “We definitely want to be league champions this year.”
