The winter season is over, it’s time to hang set aside the feelings of festivities and prepare for the spring, and the final-dreadful-and yet oddly saddening haul to June. but before we close out the school year and see our dear senior friends give a final hurrah before heading off to the “adult life”, we have some sports to talk about. For this part of the sports spring season I will be commenting about boys’ volleyball.

The boys’ volleyball season began only a few weeks ago. Sadly, their gears haven’t been oiled yet as they haven’t secured a victory, but all will come in due time. Once their gears have been oiled up, they’ll be good to go. Mr. Severns is the coach for the boys’ volleyball team and he is prepped for the season. Mr. Severns’ game plan for this season is to “help develop the young players and to constantly improve upon their performances.” Sounds like a pretty solid plan, improvement is always needed, even if a team is “perfect”, as the saying goes, “there’s always room for improvement”. Moving on, when Mr. Severns was asked if the boys play practice games, he responded by saying that they do technically play practice games, but they are non-league games. Mr. Severns went on to add that these games help the boys develop their skills and give them a chance to straighten out their weaknesses.

Returning veteran is junior Abdulkarim A.. Karim has been with the team since the beginning of his freshman year. It’s been about a year since the boys last played a game for the school, so understandably, they are a little rusty; Severns began training the boys in a similar fashion to last year according to Abdulkarim A., with a slight difference: “ this season’s training is a lot like last year, but updated a bit with a focus to fix individual faults and team ones”. This sounds great, shifting the training to focus on the individual needs of the players and the team will severely aid the boys in their campaign. When Abdulkarim A. was asked whether he feels that the training has prepared him physically for the season, he responded by saying that the training has “prepared [them] physically…(also)…[their] endurance has increased along with [their] speed and agility”. The qualities of speed and agility are essential to volleyball, speed is needed, as in many other sports, to reach the ball quickly; endurance is an obvious one, players need endurance in order to withstand the entire game without getting exhausted in the middle of it.

When asked what are some of the exercises they do, Abdulkarim. A states that they “begin with running around the court, doing multiple exercises such as pushups and curl ups” he also states that most of their “practice is taken up  with practice games so that [they] can see [their] weaknesses and improve.” I’ll slide off topic for a second to mention one thing: It gladdens me to see that Mr. Severns is still making the boys run, it must bring back joyous memories to the juniors and seniors of their days of freshman and sophomore P.E doing push ups, curl ups, running miles in the park, the good old days. Back to reality, playing practice games in order to fish out the faults is great; the team and players can see how they could perform if they were in a real game and improve if needed.