Falcons lose chance at conference after loss to Vikings

The Falcons volleyball team falls against conference rivals Long Beach City College Vikings by a score of 3 sets to 0.

The Falcons came into this game with an undefeated conference record of 6-0 while the Vikings came in with a conference record of 5-1 with the only loss being from the Falcons on Oct 16.

This game decided who the champion of the South Coast Conference.

The tension was at an all-time high with the Vikings wanting their revenge and for the Falcons to run away with the conference without a loss.

The game was played in a very noisy environment and when Long Beach City put the first point of the game on the board the crowd roared.

Cerritos head coach, Kari Hemmerling, spoke on the noise from the Vikings fans, “Hopefully once we go to the playoffs we understand this is a playoff environment and if we want to win the big moment it will be like this.”

The Falcons seemed to struggle with the crowd noise, “A lot of us were ready for it, but I think it was the crowd that caught us off guard,” Middle Blocker for Cerritos, Brisa Cortez said.

“Even though we were expecting the crowd to be big we weren’t expecting it to be that loud so we just didn’t prepare for that,” Cortez finished.

Libero/Defensive Specialist, Priscilla Castillo, added to this issue “I think it was the environment. We were more nervous than we were last time we played them.”

“We weren’t doing good under pressure in our home we had a lot of supporters that’s what got us hyped up,” Castillo continued.

The Vikings started the game hot with a 10-4 lead in the first set.

The Falcons started to close the gap with the score near the tail end being 20-16, but they couldn’t finish strong losing the set 25 to 19.

This was a recurring theme throughout the three sets played.

Sophomore setter, Leeya Rubio said, “We didn’t do a great job executing.”

She later stated, “Obviously we did really good. We could’ve done a better job serving and running a better offense on my part.”

During one of the Falcons timeouts, Hemmerling said to her players that Long Beach wasn’t going to “give them points.”

That was a big difference from this match compared to the last one as the Vikings weren’t committing a high amount of errors.

The Falcons were not able to capitalize on errors like before and had to go get points on offense.

“They just came in stronger,” Rubio said referring to the Vikings, “They knew what we had, they were prepared for what we were going to bring. They were the better team tonight.”

Rubio shared her final comments on how the team will try to improve heading into their next game. She said, “Definitely blocking, staying disciplined making sure we are in our spots…we were playing a little hectic as long as we just calm it down we will be fine.”

Cerritos College will play their final regular season game against LA Harbor on Nov. 15.