By Dean “The Sportsman” Greenaway
BVI senior men at the ECVA Championships
In its return to the Eastern Caribbean Sr. Volleyball Championships for the first time since 2019, the BVI’ men’s team wrapped up play in St. John’s, Antigua on Saturday, winless, going 0-4.
Volleyball Association President Stephen Payne in his assessment, told Island Sun Sports that since they have been out of the system in relation to competitive Volleyball outside their local league, he noticed that the other teams seem to have been playing at a higher level, although they had spots of brilliance.
“Overall, we need to be able to entertain competition at this level during our preparation for tournaments, so that we can gauge more specifically our areas of weakness,” he said. “When we played our first two games, we saw our major area of weakness, which is not attacking, but primarily passing and defense.”
After winning the first set against Grenada, 25-14, the BVI fell 12-25, 9-25 and 21-25, followed by an 11-25, 19-25 and 19-25 setback to host Antigua and Barbuda on Thursday.
“We won the first set against Grenada because truth be told, when you’re playing teams, the first set identifies for coaches, the team’s ability to play the game. They didn’t know us, we didn’t know them,” he noted. “We played how we ought to play in the first set. Everything was working—the blocking, the passing, the communication, the serving—everything worked. But in the second set, Grenada changed their lineup, they walked with a slew of players, nearly the entire six that came in. The tempo was different, and we had struggles in passing. Against Antigua and Barbuda, we had pockets of brilliance, but it wasn’t consistent enough and we struggled a lot in our passing—accurate passing to the setters. When we had a good set, we had execution on that set, so we definitely have to work on more passing.”
On Saturday, the BVI suffered straight set losses to St. Eustatius, 23-25, 18-25 and 22-25 and to Bermuda, 24-26, 12-25 and 13-25.
Payne assessed that passing is difficult unless there’s consistency. He said how they train with a limited use of the Multipurpose Sports Complex, there aren’t persons in the local league who can jump serve with a high rate and consistency, that would enable players to be exposed to that speed and when they get to competition, it’s something they’re accustomed to.
“We don’t have those kinds of sessions in the BVI as a matter of fact,” he said. “At the end of the tournament, we didn’t win any games, and it was indicative of a lack of competition level games prior to the tournament, where the finishing, mental mistakes pretty much dictated the end result of the sets that we lost.”
Payne said it’s something that can only be hurdled when the mental pressure is applied during the sessions prior to playing in a championship and playing against teams of similar developmental levels.
“We had some pockets of greatness in the first set we played, and it showed the guys are just where we wanted them to be, physically, but the mental component is what we need to shore up in the future,” he analyzed. “We have to work on making mistakes and then getting back into the game after we make mistakes, because we tend to see when the guys get dejected and disappointed in some of their plays and it’s hard to rebound from that mental state.”
