By Neto Baptiste
Coach of the Antigua and Barbuda Women’s Under-23 Volleyball team Rosemarie “Rosie” Simon is in high spirits despite their seventh place finish in the Eastern Caribbean Volleyball Association’s (ECVA) Under-23 Championships held recently in Dominica.
Antigua and Barbuda beat Anguilla 3-2 in sets in the seventh place playoff game contested on Sunday. Simon said the players did well given that the majority of the players were inexperienced.
“We only had two experienced players who played on our squad going down to Dominica but everybody else were new upcoming players that had never played volleyball on that type of a platform, so, going into the game, I think they had a lot of nerves in the first and the second game. Also, our main player was injured going down to Dominica and that affected the outcome a lot because we had to make adjustments to the line-up and because they are young players they were not familiar with the changes,” she said.

The coach, also a senior national player, pointed to nerves as the team’s biggest Achilles heel in the tournament.
“Antigua had the opportunity to be in the semifinals when they played against French St Martin and lost the game 3-2, and looking back at the games that were played Antigua, in most games, we got to 16 and 17 before majority of the other teams and so our problems were basically closing out the matches that we had. In the [French] St Martin game we had it to close out and they crumbled under the pressure but it was an experience for them. I think if they stay with this group that they will come out on top going forward,” Simon said.
Simon, who was on her first stint as a head coach at the national level, however took solace in the fact that Antigua and Barbuda walked away with a number of individual awards at the end of the tournament.
“It took a lot of disappointment from myself as the coaching staff and also from the players. It lifted their spirits their spirits a lot and it also said a lot for a team that literally came out seventh in the tournament but yet still was the second highest in personal awards overall,” she said.
Antigua and Barbuda copped a number of top individual awards during the championship’s prize giving ceremony. Captain Jassania Joseph was adjudged best server, best spiker and best scorer, while Grace Vidal finished as the number eight-ranked spiker.