The Algonquin College men’s volleyball team picked up two big wins in two days over the weekend.
The games were against Seneca Sting and Loyalist Lancers.
The weekend started with the Wolves playing on Friday night against Seneca, a team that previously beat the Wolves 3-0.
It was a back-and-forth first set with lots of high-paced action. Algonquin eventually got the better of Seneca and took a 1-0 lead, winning the set 26-24.
The second and third sets showed the quality of Wolves. They won both sets with the same score of 25-20 to complete the shutout win.
The head coach of the Wolves, Jelle Kooijmann, was happy to get the job done and to get vengeance on Seneca for the loss on Nov. 4.
“Very happy with the performance of the team. This is a game where we lost when we were on the road, and I think the guys had some redemption in their mind and they put that on the court,” said Kooijmann
“That’s a game where we get off the court and felt like we really didn’t perform the level that we wanted, and we wanted to show to the fans, to ourselves and to the opponent that the game was on us and we can perform much better,” said Kooijmann when asked about the Seneca game in November.
Algonquin played again on Saturday night against Loyalist.
It was a slow start for the Wolves. Loyalist was able to get a couple of easy points based on missed serves and mistakes that made the Wolves look frustrated on the first set. In the first timeout, the score was 13-13 and in the second timeout, the score was 22-20 for the Wolves. Algonquin ended up winning the hard-fought set 25-22, getting the 1-0 lead.
“We expected to be a little bit further ahead before the game, but looking at that set, we made a few errors and they got a few points that were pretty good, but by the end of that set I understood why it was that score, but no doubt we were going to win that,” said Kooijmann
The Wolves showed their dominance in the game by winning the second set 25-21, and breaking down Loyalist on the third set with a score of 25-16 to win 3-0.
“We played two games on the weekend, we played six sets, and we won all six of them and we got two wins, so we got to be happy with that,” said Koojimann
“We talk a lot about (the) process and the things we want to do better and what we want to get better at, but in the end, we got absolutely everything we could out of this weekend, so we’re happy with that,” said Koojimann
The man of the match on Saturday was outside player Matheus Holand. The 6-3 player from Brazil was delighted with the team’s efforts this weekend.
“We played pretty well, we’re getting more kills than we usually do. Some good blocking and some nice digs. This gave us more opportunities to do better and these were good games, we keep improving. We have some big games coming up and we must be focused for this,” said Holand
The Algonquin Wolves hope to keep their five-game winning streak going Friday night at home against the last-place team in the league, La Cite.