Baby Jaguars head coach Roldan Potot in a huddle with his players in this 2016 photo.
Being the best team after the elimination round doesn’t assure a team of the championship trophy.
The University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJ-R) Baby Jaguars can attest to that.
A steady force in the Cesafi girls’ volleyball competition, USJ-R went unbeaten in the elimination round in the past two seasons only to come up short in the playoffs.
It can be recalled that the Baby Jaguars finished the elimination round of the 2015 season with a spotless 5-0 (win-loss) card but ended up just third place.
As if once was not painful enough, USJ-R again went 6-0 in the 2016 season but still fell short, losing to Sacred Heart School-Ateneo de Cebu in the finals.
This year, USJ-R is off to a strong start once again with an impressive 7-0 record.
And the Baby Jaguars are now bent on ending the unfortunate trend and look to finally hoist up the trophy this year.
“We just need to focus on every game because I believe that 7-0 is nothing if we cannot win the title,” said Baby Jaguars head coach Roldan Potot.
The Baby Jaguars jump started their semis campaign on a strong note last Sunday as they blasted the University of Cebu (UC) in straight sets to move a win away from returning to the finals.
But the road of making a return trip to the championship round doesn’t get any easier for USJ-R as it will square up with a Southwestern University-Phinma team that is fighting for its life after dropping its first semis assignment last weekend.
“Hopefully we can limit our errors against SWU because we had a lot of errors [against UC]. There were about five or six service errors just in the first set,” Potot said.