United States' assistant coach, Michelle Chatman, addresses players during a time out.
Santa Fe, Argentina, August 22, 2017 - The United States played hard in the quarterfinals of the FIVB Girls’ U18 World Championship and got into the Top Eight of the competition.
For Player Mica Allison, one of the most important details was to serve correctly and they did it according to the plan shown by their coach, Jim Stone.
Mica Allison, Player of USA: “I think we played very good, all together and our coach told us it was important to serve, and we did it very well today. Our system really helped a lot and now we have to keep going. I think we figured out this qualification, it was hard at the beginning but we make it and we had a lot of fun also.”
Jim Stone, Coach of USA: “I think the biggest thing we did today was that we served better than we have done in the entire tournament. We put a lot of pressure to Slovenia with our service and our offensive game was very balanced. Everybody contributed and we played as a team. It will be a challenge for us to play against the best teams in the world, but we are doing things very well and I'm happy for that.”
Nika Cigale, Player of Slovenia: “We didn't play like we usually do and they were very good. Our reception wasn't very good neither. This is our first experience, we wanted to go to the best eight, but we couldn't do it. We worked really hard, but it wasn't enough”.
Casar Joze, Head Coach of Slovenia: “the USA served very well, we were bad in passing and they also played on an unexpected level today. I can understand some things, but I can't understand how we put so much pressure on ourselves. We knew we could do it, but they played awesome today and we didn't do so well so I think it was fair in some way. We have to keep on fighting, classification 9 to 16th for a small country as Slovenia is still an amazing achievement.”