EUREKA - Things are heating up for the Eureka volleyball team as the Lions continue to reach new heights.
After starting off with a 10-0 record this season, first-year head coach Julie Cross said she saw great potential with this team before the year even started.
“Just with their natural talent, I knew we were going to be a good team, but we wanted to see, could we be a great team?” Cross said. “So we’ve been really working on the finer points of the game, things that they might not have thought about before, kind of moving past just general skill set things, thinking more about tactical things, stuff like that.”
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Among their talent, coach Cross also noticed a strong veteran leadership, which made it easy to develop the team’s chemistry early in the season.
For players like senior Samantha Day, having that familiarity with each other made it easy for them to focus on developing their game.
“I think just knowing these girls for so long and being able to practice with them every day and go to school with them really just helps us as a team,” Day said.
With their hot start to the year and now that they know their capabilities, the Lions have set their goals higher than they were to start the season.
Senior Aubrey Casazza said the team is choosing to face this challenge head-on.
"It definitely puts a lot of pressure on us to continue to win and hold that expectation just for our home crowd and just everyone at our school, but it just honestly pushes us to be better,” Casazza said. “It pushes us to have the mental toughness to be like, we can do it, we’ve done it before, let's do it.”
With expectations that high, the team has Cross’ full confidence that they can live up to their high potential and make a deep run at the state tournament.
“They belong there talent-wise,” Cross said. “Whether we can get there or not, whether we can push through some of these harder matches that are coming our way, we’ll have to play those games to know for sure, but there’s no reason that they can’t have that inside of them, that belief that that’s possible, for sure.”
