Heading into the 2015 season, the Northwestern volleyball team had a new look. Losing a large number of its senior starters, the Tigers are fielding only four seniors this year with a team that does not have much varsity experience.

Claire Rocca, Kayla Maskornick, Emily Wentz and Isabel Dietrich helped lead Northwestern to a 3-0 win over Catasauqua last Tuesday night at Catty High School by scores of 25-8, 25-4, 25-8.

The win pushes the Tigers closer to a district playoff berth at 4-6 overall and 2-3 in the Colonial League. Trailing Southern Lehigh, Notre Dame (Green Pond), and Saucon Valley, the Tigers still have their work cut out for them.

They played well in Tuesday’s win over Catty and are working to get better each match.

“We’re trying to utilize that center hole in front of the net,” said head coach Gabby Pergosky. “As it was tonight, if we scored on them, they scored on us, so we had to better in that area. We’ve had the bad habit of not utilizing the other team’s weakness. So we have to keep working on finding those weaknesses and jumping on them.”

The front net players were of emphasis to Pergosky at the beginning of the year because they lost so many of their outside hitters to graduation. In her first year as head coach, Pergosky has done a nice job of mixing and matching the types of players on the Tigers roster.

“We lost a lot of seniors last year that were mostly front-row players,” noted Pergosky. “We have a lot of defensive specialists instead of attackers. So crashing and attacking at the net is something we have been working on all year. We want to keep building as a team and keep communication up because we are somewhat of a new team and they are young and inexperienced.”

There were a total of eight seniors lost from a year ago, so team building was a big part of the plan for this year. And although Pergosky is new to coaching the program, she had coached some of the players in a tournament team years ago.

Northwestern had no issues dispatching Catty, jumping out to double-digit leads early in each game, and putting the Rough Riders away early.

With four games remaining, they have a tough stretch of two games in two days the rest of the week (Lehighton and Notre Dame GP), followed by two next week against Colonial League foes to end the season.

“We want this momentum to carry through the rest of this week and next,” said Pergosky. “I want them to keep finding ways to win and see where that can take us.”