Off to a roller coaster start, the Oceanside boys’ volleyball team is not letting it define the season with a month still remaining. Splitting their first eight matches, the Sailors aren’t counting themselves out just yet.
“It’s looking really good,” coach Amanda Peluso said. “We have a lot of young kids on the team, five sophomores, since we graduated 10 seniors last year, so a little bit of a fresh start which is great because we have young blood coming up.”
There’s also six seniors and five juniors flanking the relatively-young team.
Oceanside lost a marathon heartbreaker to East Meadow on Sept. 19, losing 3-2. That loss hasn’t erased all of the lessons learned thus far, as the Sailors earned feel-good wins over Farmingdale, Westbury and Hicksville.
For starters, sophomore Chase Eisel and Ethan Silber, the Sailors’ biggest outside hitters according to Peluso, combined for 136 hits. There’s also Carter Piscione, who’s the main setter, with 189 assists thus far.
Something Peluso knows works well but wants to see another push for is the defense. The collective timely blocking was instrumental to the victories over Farmingdale and Westbury, and she herself said that it always starts with a pass.
“It always starts with a pass, so our back row getting a pass to our setter and out setter is super consistent, so he’s setting up our outside, our middle, our right side,” Peluso said. “Once we get our offense down, it’s pretty hard to stop us because we do have some pretty great hitters.”
The middle blocker, Noah Frier, was recently injured but has since returned with a splash, knocking 5 kills, a block and an assist, in a hard-fought defeat to Long Beach.
Silber is one of the co-captains, and he gets credited with controlling the pace of the game according to Peluso, instrumental to hyping the team up on points won or calming the team down if they’re behind.
The defense is as such: Ethan Cox is the libero and a co-captain, alongside Matt Vlahakis is the defensive specialist, the two currently own 153 of the team’s digs.
“Cox is always good at getting the short balls, the tips, he’s always there covering, and Vlahakis is great in the back, getting any of the deep spikes or any of the pushes in the back,” Peluso said of the tandem. Peluso added the outside hitters played strong defense as well to the burden off Cox and Vlahakis.
One thing to look forward to, she said, is what the inclusion of Phillip Konnov might do, as he’s an additional outside hitter who’s returning from injury.
The Sailors are back in action this Saturday at Division at 11:45 a.m.
“They’re excited, we’ve had some really good practices and really good conversations about it, watching game film and just preparing for the next couple of games,” Peluso said. “We have to make sure that we’re making adjustments on the fly if needed, whether that be defense, hitting adjustments, a blocking adjustment, right away, and hopefully that leads us into the following games and we just keep doing better and perfecting all of those little things and just really coming together as a team.”
