Wyatt Davis
Staff Writer
Girls beach volleyball won the second ever CIF Southern Section Division One beach volleyball championship. The Mustangs won the first inaugural championship last year, making them the sole winners of the award.
The Mustangs took on Redondo Union on April 27 and defeated them 4-1 in the Championship match at Long Beach City College. Sophomore Audrey Flanagan played with Senior Gisele Lau and were a main factor in the team’s win.”
“It is a huge accomplishment to win back to back CIF titles,” sophomore Audrey Flanagan said, “we are all proud of the way we played.”
According to Flanagan, defending the title came down to the Mustangs’ dedication and training in practice. Flanangan says that the team had to increase the intensity of their practices as they moved deeper into the postseason.
“We had to put in a lot of hard work at practice,” Flanagan said. “We weren’t able to take days off and we adjusted our practices to be at the level they needed to be to win.”
Senior Chloe Hynes agrees that the level of competition increased in the playoffs and believes that the team faced adversity on their way to defending their title.
“The hardest part of the season was definitely the playoffs,” Hynes said. “The stakes were super high, and there was a lot of pressure to win.”
The Mustangs battled injuries and absences of many of their players across the different matches of the playoffs. According to Hynes, the team’s reserves stepped up in the post-season and contributed heavily to the championship.
“It was pretty tough because we had different players out with different injuries, but I think it made us stronger as a team because we had to rely on each other and trust one another,” Hynes said. “We also had a few different players rise up, who hadn’t had as big of a role all season and really show out for us in the playoffs.”
Junior Taylor Deckert and her partner sophomore Olga Nikolaeva, and partners Savannah Lau and Giselle Lau qualified for the CIF Southern Section pairs championship, in which the two pairs represented Costa against other top pairs from other schools.
“We were really focused on making it to the tournament,” Deckert said. “We just told each other that we would give it our all.”
Deckert and Nikolaeva finished in third place, and the Lau twins went on to the finals, before narrowly falling to Palos Verdes’ top pair.
“We were prepared for teams to have that extra motivation to play their best against us,” Deckert said. “I am happy that we kept our team championship streak alive as well, which is a goal we worked hard for.
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