San Marcos finishes in fourth at Ragin’ Rattler Tournament

The San Marcos volleyball team needed to challenge itself. 

This past weekend, the Lady Rattlers went 4-2 and collected fourth place in the Ragin’ Rattler tournament defeating Nimitz, Manor, Lockhart and Austin Anderson before ultimately dropping the last two games to Justin Northwest and Denton both in two sets. Head coach Jared T’eo wants to humble his girls before they head into district play where you can’t take any nights off.

“I purposely scheduled us to play Northwest before the finals because they are a really good team and a lot of teams look at things like records. Their record is not that stellar but they’ve played all the best teams,” Te’o said. “They have a really good outside, they’ve got good middles, they’re really well-coached. So I need that to be a little bit of a wake up call, which is good because it was.”

After the best 25-match start in the last 10 years, the talent on San Marcos’ roster is undeniable. But getting all of it to join together and make it one well-oiled machine is the hard part. Te’o compared it to “eight different players playing their own versions of volleyball.” 

That premise was exemplified throughout the gold bracket championship on Saturday. After sweeping Austin Anderson at 9 a.m., 2-0 (25-19, 25-23), San Marcos dropped the first set to Northwest, 25-18. In the second set senior middle blocker Emery Jones started to become a force on the court. Trailing 20-15, Jones recorded a kill from the middle of the floor, followed by blocking Northwest’s outside. After that, Jones found success with another kill that cut the Lady Texans’ lead to two, 21-19. The senior needed someone else to score along with her but Northwest stalled her dominance by scoring four of the last five match points to secure a 25-20 win in the frame and  2-0 match win over San Marcos. The loss moved the purple and white to the gold bracket third-place match against Denton. 

In this match, it was senior outside hitter Maggie Walsh who impressed with seven kills in the first set — though, it wasn’t enough as Denton won, 25-22. Freshman Brinkley Reeves added multiple kills of her own, filling in for senior outside hitter Joselyn Roberson, who was out of commission for the final day of the tournament. Despite Reeves, Jones and Walsh putting on spectacular individual performances, the Lady Rattlers just didn’t get all of the moving parts working together throughout the last two games, causing them to drop the final set of the tournament, 25-22, and the match, 2-0. 

This is the first time this season the Lady Rattlers have lost consecutive games. Both Northwest and Denton went on runs of five or more points in their respective matches, which put San Marcos in a bind. Te’o said the team has addressed the issues ensuing within the team on the floor.

“We have errors on serve-receive or service errors and it’s usually on first contact, which is our big issue. They almost compound and build up because they are the same error,” Te’o said. “I think it’s just eliminating those runs and trying to keep it to shorter runs (will help). Instead of 6-0 runs, we need to keep it down to three. But if we make the same error multiple times and don’t make adjustments until it’s too late and against good teams, we are not going to win, which we can see in these last two games.”

Senior middle blocker Emery Jones was named to the All-Tournament Team. San Marcos (22-5) takes the floor again on Tuesday, Aug. 31, at 7 p.m. against Schertz Clemens (6-22) on the road.