Los Alamitos, here  for Ann Kang, invited to watch practice and some of the LosAl alums in Hartong and Croson. They saw a lot of athletic plays and great defense.

Skill drills to start off and then Shoji’s favorite ‘baseball’ scoring game. Lots of different combinations, so many that he lost track of what he wanted. At one point he laughed and crumpled his paper briefly. And way too many for me to get a sense of much however

Couple of things I came away with:

Uiato’s has continued to improve and her release today was amazingly quick and precise. Stauber played well but doesn’t have same touch as Uiato IMHO.

Vorster looked very good, particularly on stepouts

Hartong hit left most of the time, right a few, played middle back on D and hit 3-meter. Very impressive. Likely a team captain, leading the warm downs.

Tuaniga moving very well, had some solid blocks. When she went to the locker room afterwards she was bouncing around and looked like she had no pain.

Croson played well on defense, still has a hammer, still working a bit on hitting line from the left. Overall looked great.

Goodman on the right hit well and with authority, line and crosscourt;, blocked pretty well.

Kastl also looked good on the left and in the back row on defense and 3-meter attack.

Adolpho’s has improved her footwork, had some solid blocks.

Shoji’s biggest issue for all middles was crowding the setters. He wants more spacing instead of getting jammed up when needing to take a swing.

Overall coaches seemed pretty happy with the conditioning and effort.

Shoji is going to have a lot of options. And some hard decisions to make.

Oh and Spieler was not wearing her boot. It seems like it’s precautionary. When I saw here after practice she was walking just fine.

Sorry if I didn’t mention everyone. They played 6 innings and a lot of switching around. some of the newer players didn’t get a lot of swings, such as Hagins. Lots of switching with DSs too.

Have a good night.