Westhampton Beach Girls Volleyball Team Swept by Sayville in Semifinals

The Westhampton Beach girls volleyball team has lit a spark that interim head coach Eric Ferrante said he doesn’t see fizzling out any time soon. That’s even despite a 3-0 sweep by Sayville — 25-22, 25-11, 25-8 — in the Suffolk County Class A semifinals Friday.

“They worked really hard. We feel really good about this season. I feel proud,” said Ferrante, who filled in as head coach for Jackie Reed who is currently on maternity leave. “I knew that they were very strong athletes and that they’d already come a long way — so we had a lot to work with — and a bunch of them stepped up as leaders and helped us create a good atmosphere and standard for what this program should look like moving forward.”

The Hurricanes (12-5) hung in there the first set, bouncing out to a 7-1 lead thanks in large part to strong gameplay by senior setter Lauren Goss, who tallied two aces and a kill over that spurt.

“I felt good. I felt great the whole way,” Goss said. “We knew they were going to be stiff competition, and we just wanted to play. We wanted to play our hearts out.”

That was especially evident in the opening set, where despite eight straight points by Sayville (19-0) propelling the Golden Flashes to a 16-11 lead, a tip and kill by Goss, and back-to-back aces by Goss and senior middle blocker Sydney Anastasia helped the Hurricanes claw their way back in it.

“Getting points and blocks on a good team like Sayville is always super satisfying, and I love to serve, because most people don’t think of a middle being good at serving, so I love proving them wrong. And it makes the other team get out of system, which is always our main goal,” Anastasia said. “After playing them twice and watching some film on them we learned that we needed to swing hard and use their big blocks in our favor. We also knew we needed to hit very specific spots on the court to get constant kills, so every hitter had a game plan on where to attack.”

She said she believes Sayville wrote her team off as an automatic win.

“We hadn’t played them in while, so I think in their minds we were an easy game for them. I don’t think they expected that level of energy from us and it scared them a bit,” Anastasia said. “I think we came in with the right mindset knowing that we were going to have to fight for every point, but simple errors in the other two sets made it hard to maintain that aggressive energy we started with.”

Senior middle blocker Reilly Mahon agreed that the team’s most successful plays and points came from maintaining a positive attitude.

“We all wanted to try and push ourselves as hard as we could, and it showed,” Mahon said. “We know they are an amazing team, and it’s intimidating, but we believed they weren’t anything we couldn’t try and stop.”

Regardless of the first-set loss, the senior said she and her teammates remained in high spirits heading into the second.

“I felt excited and so proud of us, because we were playing some of our best volleyball,” Mahon said. “I think that the girls knew to leave everything they had on the court and that kept us going, even if it wasn’t the outcome we wanted.”

The little mistakes, though, began piling up for Westhampton Beach to fall from an 8-8 tie into a 22-10 hole.

“We were so excited in the beginning and we were confident because we had been practicing really hard the past couple of weeks,” Mahon said. “But I think we got in our heads thinking we had to make a perfect play, when no play in volleyball is ever perfect.”

“Sayville adjusted to our defense, but we were struggling to adjust to them,” Anastasia added. “A lot of those points were our mistakes, which dug us in a deeper deficit that became difficult to climb out of. It’s also a struggle to try and stay positive when you’re in a deep hole.”

Goss said if you’d told her last year that her team would make it to the semifinals this season, she wouldn’t have believed it.

“It’s insane for me to make it here my senior year,” the senior said. “I would have never imagined this last year, so this is so special.”

Goss said Ferrante was key to the team’s success.

“Eric is the best coach I’ve ever had,” she said.

Anastasia agreed.

“I think his coaching style really clicked with us,” the senior said. “He’s taught us all so much, and his constant positive energy has helped us tremendously.”

She said it’s been rewarding to see the team grow into what it’s become this season.

“I’ve never been a part of a team as close as we all were with each other, which makes the team dynamic so fun and easy,” Anastasia said. “I think as the season had gone on we’d only gotten better and better and learned so much, which got us as far as we did. This year, there is a new spark in the program that hasn’t been here for a while, and I’m proud to leave the legacy my senior class will be leaving behind.”