Iron sharpens Iron: Cleveland VB drops match to La Cueva 3-1

ALBUQUERQUE — In a Tuesday volleyball match that had the makings of a heavyweight boxing bout, Cleveland and La Cueva met for the first time this season after three competitive meetings in 2024.

It was a competitive back-and-forth scrap, but La Cueva would take this round three sets to one.

“I didn’t feel like we played our style of volleyball,” Storm head coach Charity Gomez said. “We just aired the ball way too much. We had around 14 service errors and got aced 14 times, and we’ve been averaging getting aced like three times. It just was not our night.”

La Cueva, playing its first match in New Mexico after a season-opening tournament in Florida, came out of the gates red hot. A 2024 semi-finalist, the La Cueva team playing with fire was too much to handle for a Cleveland team that started sluggish, with Cleveland dropping set one by 10 points, 25-15.

“La Cueva outplayed us,” Gomez said. “That’s what happens when good teams play well, and a good team just doesn’t play their style, you know? We just got beat.”

Cleveland would pack a punch eventually, starting in set two. A Storm front row that was stonewalled in the opening frame got some momentum going, and some Cleveland runs and rallies turned into a 25-19 set win to tie the match at one.

Seniors Aaliyah Simpson and Miya Branaugh provided the key blocks for the Storm, while Azylnn Tittmann and Lela Del Angel started to deliver some big swings.

A slow-to-start match would turn into a full-on brawl between the volleyball powerhouses, with set three consisting of some of the highest-quality back-and-forth rallies you may see this season.

The Storm led set three 18-15, but as Gomez referenced, the self-inflicted mistakes would come to haunt them with some attack errors and tough bounces.

At 24-23 La Cueva, Cleveland just needed one more point to extend the match (must win by two), but a rally that ended in a ball falling in no man’s land ended the Storm run as the Bears took the 2-1 set lead 25-23.

Cleveland would not take their foot off the gas, but a La Cueva team with all the momentum looked unstoppable as they would eventually pull away in set four, 25-20 for the match win.

“If this happens to us this early (in the season), we hope there’s a reason to it and we can learn from it. If we don’t learn from it, then it might be a long season,” Gomez said. “So I think it was just one of those nights, a night off. Our schedule is the number-one schedule in the state every year. You have to come to play every single time.”

Gomez’s squad’s schedule will indeed not lighten up, as the Storm head into the “Sweet Sixteen” tournament down in Las Cruces this weekend before the APS Metro tourney next week.

“We played La Cueva last night, and then now we go to Las Cruces and we play in that tournament there. So it’s just nonstop, and if our girls don’t show up day in and day out like this, this is going to happen.”