Varsity Volleyball: Knights and Lions meet in battle of new coaches

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

 

The Middletown High School Knights Varsity Volleyball team and the Liberty High School Lions are two very different teams. They both play in different counties, face different opponents, and face different sets of challenge based on the teams that they have.

There is one big similarity that the Knights and Lions share as they head into the 2016-2017 campaign and that is that both teams are starting their season with a new head coach at the helm of the program.

The return of the Jamie Pryor era in Middletown Knights Varsity Volleyball history will get underway when the Knights take on the Liberty High School Lions at Ron Engle Court at Middletown High School at 7:00 p.m.

Pryor was a coach of the Knights before and in that time has added a role as the Assistant Athletic Director to her title but after former Middletown head coach Aubrey Pfau’s departure for the University of Maryland she couldn’t resist the urge to stay away from Middletown Volleyball.

It’s a similar story out in Eldersburg as after three successful seasons for the Lions under head coach Michael Rainbow, in which the Lions recorded 40 wins, back-to-back county championships and a state tournament trip sprinkled in, Rainbow would call it quits for the Lions, forcing to find a replacement.

The replacement that they found was former Francis Scott Key High School and Stevenson university volleyball player Dani Forney who looks to take the Lions even farther than they had made it last year, with the state semifinal round of the state tournament being the stopping point of the Lions last year.

The position of having a new coach is something that no team can get used to as with a new coach comes new traditions, renovations of old ones, new tactical strategies and much of the same as each group of players tries to adjust to the inclination of the coaches that they are now playing for.

So, with that in mind there is a pretty good chance that things will go wrong for both teams tonight, but it won’t be because mistakes were made in a way that could affect the game but just that the new coaches will want things done in a different way.

The team who will win this match, then, might not be the team who plays the best but the team who adapts to what the new coaches throw at them.