Girls’ Volleyball: CdM takes down Laguna Beach
A couple of minutes before the opening serve, someone brought up Hayley Hodson’s name. The PA announcer said she was in the Corona del Mar High gym earlier on Tuesday.
Hodson wasn’t going to play for the CdM girls’ volleyball team on this night, and she won’t any time this season. The Sea Kings played their second match of the season without their former star outside hitter, and they won without her, beating Laguna Beach, 23-25, 25-11, 25-14, 25-15.
Even though Hodson was on the initial MaxPreps Preseason Volleyball All-American Team, Hodson decided not to play her senior year of high school. So far, CdM has done well without her, winning its first two matches, both at home. The contests have been against two of the traditional top programs in the CIF Southern Section, Los Angeles Marymount and Laguna Beach.
Marymount and CdM went the distance last week. The Sea Kings didn’t allow Laguna Beach to force a decisive fifth set. While the Breakers took the opening set, CdM easily won the next three, helping it improve to 31-17 all-time against Laguna Beach in best-of-five matches since 1981.
“It was a nice job of the girls making some adjustments after set one,” Sea Kings Coach Steve Astor said. “Set one Laguna came out and made some more plays than we did. We had chances to win that [second] game, a lot of chances to score in transition, and we just didn’t take advantage of [them]. That was kind of the talk between sets, is just if we’re going to get those same chances, we got to convert them a little more now, and we did a good job of that.”
The Sea Kings, ranked No. 7 in the CIF Southern Section Division 1AA preseason poll, also appear to have done a good job of moving on from Hodson’s departure. They lost one of the best players in the country in Hodson, a member of the U.S. women’s junior national team.
Astor, in his second season in charge of CdM, has the Sea Kings headed in the right direction. He said the Sea Kings’ strong suit this year is that they’re a team.
“Last year it was pretty obvious to key on certain people,” said Astor, who didn’t mention Hodson by name. “This year, if we have a certain matchup, like [against Laguna Beach] we thought we had a favorable matchup in the middle, so we ran a lot of middle. We did a good of combining that with Jessie [Harris] on the right and Paige [Migliori] on the right, who was kind of overloading that block and putting a lot of stress on their block by running two people in one zone.
“We’ll be able to scheme more offensively in a sense this year. But our strength is definitely the fact that we’re a strong team, not just on the court, but off the court. It’s a pretty tight group of girls. They’ve been through some battles here last year, which really helps for this year. Anyone can kind of do it for us any night.”
Expect to see a balanced attack from CdM this season. Three players finished in double-digit kills, Harris (12), Katie Craig (11) and Natalia Bruening (10).
Samantha Jones was two shy of the 10-kill mark, but she and Bruening controlled the middle for the Sea Kings. Bruening recorded five blocks, creating problems for Laguna Beach with her 6-foot-3 frame. Migliori and Peyton Carter also turned in strong efforts for CdM, coming up with eight digs apiece.
The Breakers might see CdM again this week. The two are competing in the top division at the Dave Mohs Championships, which run Friday through Saturday, with the final on Monday. The Sea Kings open at home on the first day of pool-play action.
Astor isn’t concerned with how his team finishes in the 32-team tournament. He wants the Sea Kings to keep improving.
The Breakers have a lot of work ahead of them. They have started 0-2 under second-year coach Raúl Papaleo.
“We knew what they were going to do,” Papaleo said of the Sea Kings, “and just as a team, we didn’t perform.”