The seats were almost packed, on Sept. 26th, to watch the awaited game of the FHC varsity girl’s volleyball team take on the Marquette’s varsity girl’s volleyball team, a known tough opponent. The teams both played hard, but the Marquette Mustangs started to pull a lead over the Lady Spartans.

The Lady Spartans started to close the lead then lost it again, ultimately the first match ended in a score of  25-20. Anticipation was high at the beginning of the second match, effort was high towards the start but then started to diminish as the second match ended at 25-16.

This loss against Marquette added to the Lady Spartan’s losing streak, making it 4 losses in a row. Tension and frustration followed after the  Lady Spartan’s experienced another consecutive loss. Effort within the team, towards the end of the matches, seemed to be the major issue according to Natalie Green, one of the two team captains.

“Our problem has been, the whole season, the other team will get on a run and like everybody shuts down, except like one or two players, but it is not enough to bring everyone back into it,” said Green.

Green was frustrated with the team as effort did noticeably diminish over time in the game. It was as if they already lost in their heads and felt like any other effort would be futile. The team’s actions reflect on Green partially as she is a co-captain, so she wants to see the best effort from all her teammates and to ultimately break this losing streak.

“They got on a run, we couldn’t get it back together, we couldn’t put a ball away, we couldn’t pass a ball. That was probably what I was most frustrated with,” said Green.

Other players on the team saw the same issue with effort being a major issue to improve on. Kara Fihe, a junior on the team, was not as frustrated as Green, but she saw an issue with the overall aggression lacking in the matches by the team.

“We could probably stay aggressive throughout the whole game, instead of kind of giving up when we realized we will probably lose the game,” said Fihe. “We should probably keep pushing through.”

Fihe understood that she and her team were up against a respectable opponent, but she feels though that they did not play the best they possibly could have. Fihe did feel though that the team was consistently displaying one positive feature.

“I feel like we kept our positivity up more than we usually do,” said Fihe.

 The team plays Francis Howell North on September 27th and it will offer the Lady Spartans another chance to turn their losing streak around.