Welcome

  New coach. New energy. Old nemesis.

                That's the short version of the 2008 volleyball season at Northwest.

The longer version goes like this: New Trapper coach Flavia Siqueira, a Brazilian native, came to Northwest last summer via College of the Southwest in Hobbs, N.M. She brought with her a couple of her former CS team members, as well as a few club players from South America. It was a north-meets-south encounter when these women and a handful of Rocky Mountain players showed up for the first practice. Add in the Siqueira mindset (some around here are calling it magic), and a team was born from the progeny of two hemispheres.

Trapper fans couldn't have been happier with the result, even though they were only treated to three sets during most of the home matches - that was all it took usually for the Trappers to obliterate their competition.

Beyond Cabre Gym, Siqueira and her players caused jaws to drop all over Region IX during the regular season, racking up a 38-8 record. That's even more impressive when you consider that half those eight losses were posted in one weekend during the team's season-opening tournament in Idaho.

The Trappers broke into the nation's top 20 ranking just before the Region IX North Tournament, which is where an old nemesis reappeared. Casper College is located in the center part of Wyoming, and apparently it took that central stance to withstand the killer north-south punch that had worked so well all year for the Trappers. 

Northwest claimed victory in just three sets during its first Casper encounter of the tournament but couldn't repeat the win in two subsequent matches that saw Casper eventually grab the championship.

The act of getting so close to the grail without claiming it sometimes becomes the prevailing memory of a season. It's not playing out that way at Northwest. People are still talking about how great the season was, how the team was like family, how proud the campus is of the coach and the players.

Just goes to show, you don't get the real story until the end (of the long version).

» « 1 - 5