Volleyball coach urges players to be more committed

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National volleyball coach, Carl Williams, wants players to pay more attention to their own personal development and raise the standard of their game when representing the country.
His call follows Antigua & Barbuda’s third place finish at the Eastern Caribbean Volleyball Association (ECVA) Men’s championships held in St Lucia one week ago. Five teams competed in the tournament played at the indoor volleyball facility in Beausejour.
“Some players have fallen off tremendously over the past three years because their focus or their priorities in a way, have gotten mixed up where they prefer to be part of something else and volleyball becomes number two,” he said.
“When you get to the national level I should not be teaching you how to block, I should not be teaching you how to approach because we don’t have the time for that,” he added. 
Antigua & Barbuda defeated Dominica 3-0 (25-20, 25-13, 25-22) to take the third place playoff.
Williams recounted their only loss of the tournament as painful and somewhat unexplainable.
“We went down there with one mentality, we went down there with a plan and in the first game we came up against Dominica. We won the first set rather comfortably and then in the second set the game was neck and neck but a player went down for me with an ankle injury so he was out,” the coach said.
“After that, I think, everybody sort of just relaxed and Dominica started playing smart where, instead of playing powerful, they started pushing the ball in some areas and we failed to react to the change
that Dominica made,” he added.
The former national player also lamented the lack of adequate preparation time afforded the
team ahead of the tournament.
“We had 10 practice days and from the tournament we had last year I saw where we were weak and it was my intention to strengthen those areas but due to a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line we only had 10 days and with some new players along with some familiar ones, we had to focus more on an all-round game so we didn’t have the time to spend on any particular area,” Williams said.
Before the bronze medal place was decided, French St Martin secured the fourth spot, ousting St Vincent and the Grenadines, 3-1( 25-20, 25-22, 9-25, 25-21).
St. Vincent and the Grenadines was the only team in the tournament to be winless, ending with four losses. French St Martin conjured up one win and three losses.

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