Days after winning against both Tottenville and Stuyvesant High School, the Francis Lewis Boys’ Varsity Volleyball team faced off against Bayside High school on May 13 in the quarter finals, losing 0-2. They were knocked out of their place in the playoffs after competing against Bayside for the third time this season.
“I started injured, so I wouldn’t say it was our best game, but there were just errors,” sophomore Andy Pan said. “We have to come to know that those errors were our fault, and that’s the reason why we lost, but don’t worry, next year we’ll still win.”
At heart, volleyball is a team sport that heavily relies on getting everyone on the same page to get the results they all strive for. Captain Jason Zheng talked about how they bond as a team, and the specific things they do.
“I mean, there’s a lot of team culture on the team,” Zheng said. “We have this guy named Daniel, we don’t call him Daniel, we call him Luis. That’s a very small part of [the] culture. Before every game, we have our circle that we get into, and we chant.”
Individual skills are just as important as team chemistry. By having the more experienced players work with the newer ones, they can grow as a team and improve together.
“It starts day one,” Coach Ms. Scalisi said. “I always make my seniors pair with the freshmen. For tryouts and no cuts, they’re never going to be with their friends or the people that they hang out with. They’re going to take a younger kid and they’re going to work with them. Something that we talk about in practice is we are only as good as our weakest link.”
Despite still suffering a few losses throughout their season, they improved upon their previous mistakes and set out to seek revenge.
“When we went against Bayside High School in our second game against them, we wanted revenge,” Pan said. “So when we were playing on the court during the game, we just locked up.”
Even with a traumatic injury happening to one of their star players, the team tried not to let it affect them, and played to the best of their abilities. Ms. Scalisi talked about how “the ones that were left on the court really wanted it. They were going to prove that even without Wai, we were going to win it.”
“The injury happened in round one of the playoffs,” Ms. Scalisi said. “The boys really had to work together,” Scalisi says. “People who typically weren’t starters had to step up their game to play. That loss to Bayside, they played very well. We lost 29-31.”
