Defending champions Costa Rica score straight set win over Belize

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala, October 8, 2014. -  Defending champions Costa Rica scored a straight set victory over Belize 25-14, 25-11, 25-18 to claim their second win at the Women’s XVIII Central American Cup at Teodoro Palacios Flores Gymnasium.

After a hard five-setter against Nicaragua in their debut, Costa Rica finished Belize with complications in the third set, while using bench players and Belize taking a six point lead. Belize with a sequence of unforced errors handed out Costa Rica easy points to pull through a ten point rally.

The reigning champions maintains unbeaten with a 2-0 win-loss record and 8 points; Belize drops to 0-3.

Costa Rica out-blocked Belize 11-5, they held a 34-16 advantage in kills and a 5-4 in aces; they committed a total of 18 unforced errors while Belize produced 25.

Sisters Angela and Verania Willis led Costa Rica’s scorers with 13 points apiece; and Tichele Solis led her team with 8 points.

Costa Rican captain Angela Willis said “even if it was a straight set victory, we are not satisfied; we have much to improve, mostly on our mentality; the physical and technical aspects are doing fine”.

“Costa Rica’s serves made our passing difficult. I know almost entirely the third set but when they brought back the sisters (Willis) we couldn’t keep up the pace” said captain Tanesha Encalada.

Coach Horacio Bastit explained his tactics “we wanted to give every player an opportunity but we had to bring back the senior players to finish with a win. As I said before, we are in a restructure process and sometimes it’s frustrating that things aren’t going as expected, but this needs to be done. We are struggling in reducing our amounts of unforced errors because our strength over the net is performing well”.

“I told my players to take advantage that Costa Rica was using their U-23 players in the third set, it went well up to one point and our unforced errors made their come-back. Our attacking is efficient but the other categories our killing us” said coach Jose Reyes.