Volleyball first team win ‘Battle of Bermuda’
Claudia Stich and Allison Lacoursiere prevailed in the ‘battle of Bermuda’ yesterday, topping their women’s beach volleyball colleagues Stacey Dorush and Heather Wearmouth 2-0 in quarter-final action at the Island Games.Playing for Bermuda I, Stich and Lacoursiere won 21-18, 21-17 against their Bermuda II teammates to win the best-of-three match.Heading into the playoff round, Bermuda II had been seeded fourth, while Bermuda I was seeded fifth.Stich and Lacoursiere take on the top-seeded Menorca duo of Maria Bonafont and Vanesa Ruiz in semi-final play Wednesday at 11am, while Gotland’s Jenny Sander and Sofia Wahlen face the Cayman Islands team of Cristin Alexander and Jennifer Wolfenden in the other semi-final.The women’s bronze medal match will be played today at 5pm, while the gold medal match will be contested at 7pm.“We are Bermuda I and so the expectation is that we should beat Bermuda II, as we have done many times in training,” Stich said. “There are a lot more head games involved because we know each other so well. In the match, we made 8-10 service errors in the first set alone. I am quite pleased that we are playing Menorca in the semi-final rather than Cayman.”Menorca, the Island Games women’s beach volleyball gold medallist in 2007 in Rhodes — the only other time the sport has been included in the Games — defeated the Bermuda II team of Dorush and Wearmouth 2-0 (21-9, 21-16) in preliminary round action.“We had a strategy to beat Bermuda I and we might have won if we had just got our serve in more consistently,” Dorush said. “We knew how to beat them — we just didn’t execute.”Added Wearmouth: “A lot of it was our own mistakes, particularly service errors.”