<\/p>\n
After a win against Shiprock Northwest on Tuesday and a loss to Newcomb on Friday, the Mancos volleyball team entered its home contest on Saturday against undefeated Ridgway (3-0) with a 1-2 record.<\/p>\n
The Blue Jays, who were without senior setter Jessica Gutierrez, struggled early.<\/p>\n
After jumping out to a quick 7-0 lead, Ridgway took advantage of Mancos\u2019 errors to win game one 25-8.<\/p>\n
Senior Taryn Gordanier got the Blue Jays out to a better start in game two, scoring the game\u2019s first point with a spike, and junior Nicole Hess added some flair with a sneaky tip-shot to give Mancos an early 2-1 lead.<\/p>\n
But Ridgway dropped in a flurry of aces and controlled the rest of the game on the way to a 25-14 victory.<\/p>\n
The Blue Jays again trailed early in the day\u2019s third game, and Ridgway senior Kaitlyn Rutherford powered the Demons to a 25-13 win to clinch the match in three straight sets.<\/p>\n
Rutherford finished the day with 10 kills, and the Blue Jays were led by Gordanier\u2019s six kills.<\/p>\n
Mancos missed the play of senior Jessica Gutierrez, with head coach Brittany Lang saying that her absence affected the team, \u201cAs much as one can be affected.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shuffling the roster to compensate for her absence, Hess was moved to setter and freshman Mackenzie Benitez was pulled up to the varsity squad.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe had never played in a varsity game in her entire life,\u201d Lang said of Benitez. \u201cShe was really nervous, but I think that with pulling stuff together the way we did, we played pretty well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hess filled in valiantly at setter, finishing with eight assists, and Benitez made the most of her varsity debut, recording three aces.<\/p>\n
Lang acknowledged the high number of errors her team committed, but she expects the young team to clean up its mistakes as the season progresses.<\/p>\n
\u201cErrors will diminish as the year goes on,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re still a really, really young team, and today we only had two returning varsity players from last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dropping their first conference game to Ridgway, the Blue Jays fall to 1-3, but they envision a closer matchup in their next conference game at Telluride on Tuesday at 4:00 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Volleyball team falls to Ridgway in three games<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":109527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6313],"tags":[83],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-109526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports-2","tag-mancos"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109526"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=109526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}