Cavs count on the ‘tude to carry through season

Published 12:00 pm Wednesday, October 5, 2005

KINGSTON — Spiking, digging, blocking, setting and passing are just some of the aspects one needs to excel at to play volleyball. But there are many intangibles that are just as important that teams and players need to succeed in the sport.

First and foremost on the minds of the Kingston Cavaliers team is attitude — a characteristic that can both make a team or destroy it.

“We’re working on having a good attitude,” said ninth grader and Cavs’ outside hitter Amanda Cantwell. “We can’t let the little things bother us. We have to be able to shake them off.”

One aspect of attitude is being able to come together as a team through friendship and camaraderie. Fortunately for the Cavs, that won’t be a problem.

“We all work together and get along really well,” Cantwell said.

The team can focus more on the mental game due to its deep talent pool, a position which has KJH coach Su-A Stevens feeling confident the squad will rack up the wins this year.

“I’ve been blessed with a really good all-around group of girls,” she said.

Stevens said she’ll even be utilizing the all-defensive libero position this season, the only one in the junior high league to do so.

Stevens, once the coach of North Kitsap High School’s JV team, brings a hard-nosed, disciplined approach to the game. As a former player, she said she knows how good these girls are and can be, and therefore holds them to high standards.

“I’m a player,” Stevens said. “So I coach like I play.”

Stevens said that their biggest troubles will come in an area in which she cannot help — height.

She has two girls who are around 5 foot 7 inches tall, but otherwise, they’re all 5 foot 5 inches and shorter. Still, other schools, including Poulsbo, have height issues as well, and Stevens added, “It’s not a negative.”

The team will simply shift its strategy away from using a lot of blocking to one that uses a lot of digging, Stevens said. But the emphasis will be working all parts of the game as well.

“I want for them to be able to go to high school and when the coach says, ‘Who wants to be a setter?’ they all raise their hands,” she said. “But I also want them to have a position they’re really good at.”

“Ultimately, I want them to play college ball,” added Stevens, a former Olympic College player.