The Coppell volleyball team knew that, coming off a 3-0 loss to Rockwall, they needed to respond on Tuesday against Keller in its last preseason match before district play.

And while the Cowgirls ended up falling to Keller, 3-2 (25-23, 25-20, 29-27, 25-20, 15-0), at the CHS Arena on Tuesday, there were plenty of positive takeaways and lessons learned from the match itself and the way the team played.

The first four sets were all heavily contested, with each team going punch-for-punch and responding to each other’s play to keep each point alive and to play for.

 The match could’ve gone either way but it was the Indians (14-12) with all the momentum after taking the first two sets, leaving the Cowgirls (20-3) with it all to do if they were to come away with anything from the game. 

“We recognized after the first and second set that it was an error type game so whoever made the most errors would probably lose,” Coppell coach Libby Pacheco said. 

The third set, however, shifted all the momentum to Coppell after tremendous defensive play and a strong offensive front fought off two match points and gave the Cowgirls the set. In the fourth set, the Cowgirls continued to push past a Keller defense that was relentless and fought for every play. It wouldn’t be until the 18th point where the Cowgirls rose past the Indians.

“Especially during the intensity of the third and fourth sets, you started to see the change in effort within our team and it’s usually difficult to see that especially when, in the fifth set, we all let it go,” Coppell senior right-side hitter Abby Hendricks said. “It shouldn’t take us one to two sets to get into our groove and really play and it felt like a very individual game up until we brought new people into the third set. I’m proud of the effort we put out and we out hustled Keller but if we are able to play confidently then we wouldn’t have to throw ourselves over the floor.”

The fifth set saw Keller return to its former self, rolling to a 4-0 lead and carrying that energy throughout the set to kill off any Cowgirl attempt at a reverse sweep.

“We were obviously all tired; some of us were playing all the way around and after forcing all our energy through sets one, two, three and four, we fell out of it [in the fifth set] and that’s something that can’t happen in the future and something that we are going to work on in practice,” Hendricks said. 

The Cowgirls open their district campaign by hosting Flower Mound, the area’s No. 2 team, on Friday at the CHS Arena, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

“As of 7:30 p.m. [Tuesday], when that last ball hit the floor, we’re 0-0,” Pacheco said. “We’re obviously going to learn pretty quickly on Friday if we can bounce back from a loss like this, especially when we came back and battled. Flower Mound is great but every game we have from here on out is going to be a battle.” 

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