Bad pass, bad attack, error here, error there; just about everything was going wrong for the home team, but on the opposite side, the visiting players were nearly unstoppable.
“Oh my goodness,” one fan said after the visiting El Camino women’s volleyball sophomore middle blocker Jewel Yandall slammed a kill on the floor to give the Warriors a 15-4 lead in the first set.
A little ways off to the side a woman in the crowd said, “She’s just too good.”
El Camino (ranked No. 6, 23-2 overall, 13-0 in the South Coast Conference) clinched the conference championship when it visited the L.A. Harbor College Seahawks (1-16 overall, 1-12 in the SCC) in three straight sets (25-12, 25-8, 25-7) on Friday.
With the championship secured, EC coach Le Valley Pattison has taken the Warriors to six-straight title wins and it is the seventh in the last eight seasons.
“It’s a great achievement,” she said. “You get a new team every two years, and (it’s nice) that we have a good history. We have a solid coaching staff and a ton of support from the school.”
Assistant coach Liz Hazell said that it was exciting to win the match.
“(The championship) is always a goal,” she said. “But we’ve got one more match and we need to take care of it. (We want) to be seeded high (in playoffs).”
Although Harbor can be considered one of the weaker teams in the conference, and the state, Yandall thought Harbor was more efficient compared to the last match-up.
“They were a four out of 10 this time,” she said. “It was a little better than last time.”
What set the tone for the Warriors was the incredibly good serving in the match; and not by just one or two players, everyone was putting the Harbor defense in disarray multiple times.
“That’s the way it should be,” freshman setter Cassie Montani, who played libero in the third set, said. “The reason it was a such a big win, the reason there was a big difference was because the serving was awesome.”
The women’s volleyball team will play its last regular-season game at home against Cerritos College on Wednesday at 6 p.m. in the South Gym.
