BELLEVILLE • After watching his team thoroughly thump Fox 25-6, 25-13 Monday night in a nonconference boys volleyball match, Belleville East outside hitter Brad Buchanon had a very good assessment of the Lancers play.
"We kind of lose (that killer instinct) sometimes during a game," Buchanon said. "We need to have that throughout the game and all of our entire matches. Some of the games, and no offense to (Fox), they're not one of the better teams, so it's easy to lose that.
"Whenever we play a team like Edwardsville (East hosts the Tigers Thursday), we're going to come out for blood. We're going to have that entire time. If we get up by 10 points, we're going to have that the entire time. We're going to keep going and smash 'em into the ground. That's our goal."
The goal was easily reached Monday as the Lancers (10-2) used a hitting error by the Warriors (1-8) to break a 2-2 tie and jump to an 11-3 advantage. Buchanon was responsible for five of the nine points serving five straight aces. He also had three kills in the game.
"This game we really focused on cutting down on our errors and finishing the game early," he said. "So we have results like that 25-6, which is a pretty solid win."
East gave Fox five points in the first game with five unforced errors and the Warriors Sam Parr had the only point _ a kill to make the score 22-6.
"They earned one point," noted Buchanon. "In games like this, we need to, in practice, cut down on service errors and things like that."
In the second game, east coach Stefanie Marlin used a different lineup putting Buchanon on the bench and that mismatched squad was just as successful although the group committed 10 unforced errors (15 for the match) that kept the game close.
With the score 4-2, Fox's Nick Narez blocked a Ryan Smith kill attempt at the net to make it 4-3. However, the Lancers scored eight of the next 10 points for a 12-5 advantage. The Warriors were able to trim the deficit to 15-9 thanks to a serving error by Ben Thomas.
East then reeled off 10 of the final 14 points for the triumph.
"These guys don't really have too many ups and downs," Marlin said. "Sometimes in a match they tend to get quiet. But usually they can pick themselves up and I commend them for that because that's hard to do _ turn it on and off."
After a 14-11-1 season in 2010, Fox coach Scott Mertens said this year's squad is different.
"It's not the team we had last year," he said. "Unfortunately we play the game with our bodies and not our minds. That's what been hurting us all year long. We had players last year who knew the game inside and out. They played the game between their heads and not just with their bodies.
"That the problem with this team here. They don't play between their ears. We've got a long road ahead of us. Like I said, there's always tomorrow."
