By NICHOLAS BRAMANTE and KARINA MATOS
Another year, another season, and Malden High School’s varsity volleyball team are bringing back the heat, once again. Last year the team had seen quite a successful season, performing their best in the Greater Boston League. With a fresh new Varsity team both ambitions and pressure are high.
With three years of coaching under his belt the new head volleyball coach, Matthew Sadowski, is excited about the new season and thinks that the team has a pretty good shot of winning the GBL. “The team has room for improvement,” he said, “we lost a lot of seniors, so it’s a pretty new team this year.” However, although this is his first time coaching varsity, he thinks the team really could succeed. The team, he said, is focusing now on serving, passing, communication, and working together as a team. “Four things,” he commented, “that all teams, even good ones, need to practice.” Even though having to teach players the game from scratch, since a lot of them had never played before joining,is challenging, Sadowski still describes coaching as “fun” and “exciting.” Although he has played volleyball for quite a long time, in high school and college, he says he is “still learning as a coach and a player.” Hopefully, his experience and knowledge will help lead the team to victory.
Even though it might be quite a challenge to perfect the art of volleyball, Sadowski seems pretty confident in the team’s abilities. Through rigorous training, he claims that the team improves each day of practice. Despite the setbacks the team has experienced this year in the form of losses, Sadowski still firmly believes that the Varsity has a shot at advancing forward in the ranks of volleyball this year. While the process can vary, a normal day’s practice for the team, consists of a few very essential parts. These parts include stretching, passing, serving, honing fast reaction skills, and short but high intensity drills. These practices are essential gears in the machine that is the varsity volleyball team. All this work payed off in the home game against Everett, in which the varsity team was able to make multiple saving passes and serves, that ultimately ended with MHS’s victory. Hopes remain high for the team, as both Sadowski and the team keep learning, and stay centered.
