Last year’s boys volleyball team. Picture from Blue and Gold archive.
The Boys Volleyball team has started off the season with an even record of three wins and three losses. There are 13 members a part of the Malden High School volleyball team, along with two senior captains Ryoma Yonetani and Reda Said. The whole team is preparing for the rest of the season.
Being one of the captains, Yonetani mentions that the goals of the this year’s team is to make “states again and win the league,” since last year the team had managed to make it to states. In order to make states the team has to win 10 games. Through his leadership this year, Yonetani hopes to continue on making the team have better communication, they begin trying new strategies such as “after each play [they] gather in a circle to motivate one another.”
This year the team composition is a bit different from the previous years since last year, the starting line was mostly seniors, but this year is consist of mostly juniors and seniors. Senior Gabriel Madeira mentions that “[they] do have familiar faces from last year but [they] lost more than half the team from last year, [they] have to get use to each other and play to [their] skill sets.” Despite the large number of newer players, there are a lot of talented players and there isn’t a prominent strength of the team since everyone is “naturally” talented according to Yonetani.
In order to prepare for the remainder of the season, Yonetani says that the team is “going to practice everyday and communicate more, being more open as well as talking to each other about what we are not satisfied with.” Since the team is still new to one another, they are trying new ways to start communicating more.
Some of the players that stand out to the captains is Senior Nour Tafraoui, who is a new player within the team but “plays all the positions and is on the starting line.” Along with that Madeira mentions that Yonetani is a good captain and motivates everyone to try to do their best and junior Jason Chan.
Although the team chemistry is building smoothly, one of the games that the team is worried to go against is Randolph High school, since they lost to them in the previous year.
An upcoming game is against Greater Lowell Tech on Monday, April 29. As more games are coming up the team is working hard to be prepared for every game, and hopefully get a good record.
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