FRAMINGHAM — A clean 3-0 sweep may look good on the stat sheet, but to Newton North boys volleyball coach Nile Fox, it was a reminder that the final score doesn’t always tell the whole story.
While the Tigers took care of business on the road against Framingham, Fox was none too pleased with his team’s execution.
“I think they might have came into this game thinking that they were just going to win, and maybe not taking it that serious,” Fox said. “I think that they were loose, and I don‘t think it was a good loose.”
A confident bunch, the defending state champions rolled into the gymnasium with their heads held high and made quick work of the Flyers in the first set, winning 25-13.
The Tigers cheered, danced, and took their foot off the gas.
In the middle frame, Newton North found itself in the unfamiliar position of trailing by as many as 10 at one point. Surely enough, the visitors stormed back and took the set by a two-point margin, but felt they didn‘t deserve to.
“We were just kind of too complacent,” said Brady Dwyer. “We weren‘t putting pressure on everyone to be better, and, throughout the game, we were just making lazy mistakes. We made many errors, which contributed to a close second set that never should have happened in the first place.”
Dwyer had a pedestrian performance. It was hard for the libero to have any more when the majority of Framingham’s attempts were blocked at the net to begin with. Simon Vardeh was once again the main source of Newton North’s offense as he emphatically fired serves over the net like they shot out of a cannon.
A 25-6 finish for the Tigers in the final set helped them reassert themselves and stretch their winning streak to five matches.
Far from their best, they still managed to take the victory as if it were a foregone conclusion, and that was their problem in the first place.
“We got to take every game seriously,” Fox said. “We got to treat every game like it’s the last game. I hope there’s no entitlement or anything like that, thinking that because we won the state championship, that we’re just going to do it again, because that’s not promised.
