During their season opener at Algonquin the Thunder wasted no time, jumping out to a 2-0 set lead over the George Brown Huskies on Oct. 24.
Just needing to win one more set, they were so close to starting the year on a high note.
“We had it,” said head coach Mohamed Shaheen. “We had it the first two (sets) and I’m not sure what happened, but the energy went a little bit down.”
It was in the third set where the team was overconfident, loose with their passes, overly relaxed with their serves. After they lost the third set rather handedly, that confidence turned into tension.
“We lost teamwork in the third and fourth set,” said Shaheen, in his first year coaching the Thunder. “I think the guys, for some reason, felt like it was going to be an easy game.”
Algonquin went on to lose the match 3-2 in a heartbreaker.
The Thunder have a young squad. Only three players are in their second year at Algonquin. The rest are rookies.
“We have four or five guys that this is their first official game in their life,” said Shaheen. “They have some basics, but we’re trying to teach them from scratch, so it takes time. It takes time to build a team.”
But the team isn’t taking their loss as purely a negative outcome. They’re making progress and they know it.
“It was definitely a big improvement,” said Gareth Luke, a first-year business and entrepreneurship student. “Last time we played (the Huskies) in the tournament, we didn’t have a chance at all.”
Luke says that the team is focusing on their play early on, in which they were exceptional.
“You can see the first two sets we were moving well and talking to each other,” said Luke. “The chemistry was flowing and we were making our way through the game.”
The problems are very fixable. They’re slip-ups, “mental errors” as rookie Jonah Nieman explains.
“I myself missed a few serves and I know a couple of other guys missed a couple, but that’s got to change,” said Nieman. “Just simple mistakes on our part. We gave them a lot of points.”