December 5, 2024

Mens-BlockBY KELSEY DUNBAR

The St. Clair Saints marched over the Conestoga Condors during back to back games on Nov. 17.

The Conestoga men’s and women’s volleyball teams hosted two home games at the Conestoga College rec centre with the women’s team playing first. The team which wins three out of five sets is the victor. The Condors had three very close matches but lost all of them, giving the Saints the victory.

“We were leading and we didn’t close the matches when we needed to … They were better than us at the end of each match,” Coach Marek Gwozdz said.

The men’s team didn’t have any better luck. They lost the first match by 9 and the second match by 17. The score of the final match was 25 to 18 for the Saints.

“St. Clair is a very good team,” Coach Wayne Harris said. “They are more experienced than us, they are more technically sound and they are older than we are. They are a really solid team … We competed with them well in the first match but our inexperience showed and then all of a sudden we were down five or six points.

“We gave into our frustration, and we didn’t show up at all in the second set … Then in the third set we competed again.”

St. Clair is ranked fourth in the OCAA west division and Conestoga is ranked eighth.

After the second match, Harris sat all of his players down for a mid-game pep talk, and whatever he said must have struck some sort of nerve because the team that played hard in the third and final match was not the same team as the first two matches. However, it was not enough to volley the Condors into a fourth match.

The Condors’ next home games are Dec. 4 against Niagara College.