by rick olivares
The season is close to its end. Three teams have been eliminated with one more battling for dear life. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the teams that are now on vacation.
University of the East (0-13)
There’s the saying that when you’re down, there’s nowhere to go but up. Unfortunately, that’t not always the case. When you’re down, sometimes, you fall even lower. Besides, we’ve heard that the last four or five years running. You see, Season 74 was the last time the Lady Warriors tasted a win when they finished at 4-10.
Here is their record of futility over the last few seasons:
S75 0-14 but they won five sets
S76 0-14 but they won three sets
S77 0-14 but they won one set
This year, they are 0-13 with only one won set.
See what I mean about down going lower?
Their consolation is this isn’t any record for futility. That goes to the NU Lady Bulldogs who prior to the SM group purchasing the school and going on mass recruiting binges, hardly won anything. But going winless in four straight seasons is an eternity. Unless, something changes, someone is going to graduate from college without knowing what a win feels like.
It would be like flogging a dead horse if we even bother to check all the statistical categories on how they finished.
It’s not like they do not have talent and they’re able to play well in certain stretches. Whatever ways they are running their team/program aren’t working. Time to take it to a new direction.
Adamson University (3-10)
They are better than their record suggests. They’ve got the talent — Jema Galanza, Mae Roque, Mylene Paat, Erika Alquino, Fen Emnas, and Joy Dacoron. They’ve even got possibly the next Danna Henson (the power playing but reed-thin spiker for Arellano University) in Bernadette Flora.
However, that’s offensively. The Adamson teams of years past made their name because of stingy defense. They are at the bottom of nearly every statistical category. They should make a re-commitment to playing defense and chose a coach who will really guide them and not yell at them at every infraction.
University of Santo Tomas (5-9)
We’d start out with the same postulate that we did with Adamson with a big caveat — the UST Golden Tigresses have a very good team that underperformed. They should be in the Final Four. Beefed up by key recruits and the ascension of some players, they lost one more match than they did the previous season (and that was a weaker squad).
I thought that save for Cherry Rondina and EJ Laure — two of the top five scorers in the league — everyone else was in and out of the line-up starting or coming off the bench. I thought up to the very end, this team had not settled on who was their setter. Not good for a team to be experimenting and trying to find the right combination even up to the last game.
My take on them — their individual roles should be really determined, the mantle of leadership given to who is most deserving, and to work on their confidence.
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