The Morgan volleyball team flipped the script this season with a rare five-game winning streak, marking them as a contender in the conference. The team has 11 wins and 9 losses overall, with 9 wins and 9 losses coming out of the Shoreline Conference, placing them in sixth place, below Cromwell High School. In the Connecticut Class S state conference, Morgan is in ninth place. This is in stark contrast to last year, when the team was 8-14 with a 4-game losing streak toward the middle of the season.
The season started off rough; of the first 11 matches, they lost seven, five of which were played in under five sets. That was until the Portland game, October 1st, when Morgan turned the tides with a 3-0 win over the Highlanders.
A big part of the team’s success was the talk they had with their coach, Jessica Lynch, before practice September 29th. There, they discussed how the team hadn’t been playing as well as they could be during the beginning of the season, which led to the idea of the “revenge tour.”
Sophomore Destiny Cacopardo, who plays right side for both junior varsity and varsity, believes that what led to the teams’ success was the idea of the revenge tour. “The start of the revenge tour changed our mindset towards the rest of the season,” Cacopardo said.
The revenge tour was Mrs. Lynch’s idea. She pulled the girls into her classroom before practice. The energy in the room was “hyped and excited,” Cacopardo remembers. “She knows we are capable of big things,” said Cacopardo. “She believes in us, and she wants us to believe in ourselves and play to our full potential.” When the team stepped out onto the court for practice that Monday, the team came together to motivate each other to make sure that they secured the next win. After that talk, the team started their five game winning streak.
Junior, Kendra Brown, the libero for the varsity team, shared that what contributed to the start of the revenge tour was “the fact that we were losing a lot of our games in the start of the season.” Games they shouldn’t have lost. She defined the revenge tour as “basically playing against the same teams we lost against and beating them the second time around.” Morgan would go on to beat three of the teams they had lost to prior.
For Cacopardo, the change was felt through the entire program. For her, the level of cheering and support from JV up to varsity significantly increased from the beginning of the season. Cacopardo pointed out that during the varsity games, the main job of the JV team is to cheer on the varsity as loudly as they can. “Once we got our cheers down, the JV really started to get really loud during the game, which always helps us get hyped,” Cacopardo explained.
The biggest win of the season in the eyes of Cacopardo was when the varsity won 3-2 against Montville high school on October 9th, a week after the Portland game. This game marked the tail end of the revenge tour before their loss against Valley Regional high school, only four days later. The game against Montville was special because the team really worked together to secure the win. The team communicated with each other with support and comfort, which allowed them to make better plays in the game, which led to more points being scored.
The team would bounce back after the Valley game loss, beating North Branford High School, a notoriously good program, and then a good win against East Haven in 4 sets, 3-1.
Morgan Volleyball’s season may have started with some doubts, but the team’s hard work, chemistry, and support from players helped them rewrite the story of Morgan Volleyball. With big wins behind them and more to come, the “revenge tour” isn’t just a silly thing they called their winning spree; it’s the mindset that the players have taken with them to push them through the last bit of the season.