Mira Costa’s Miss Perfect
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Mira Costa’s Falyn Fonoimoana is not your typical sophomore volleyball player.
Earlier in the season, the 6-foot-4 outside hitter verbally committed to USC. Last summer, she traveled to Poland to take part in a beach volleyball event and she has been a member of the U.S. Under-14 and U-18 national teams.
Despite all of that, she somehow elevated her game on Saturday night at Cypress College.
‘In my opinion, I don’t know if the USC Trojans would have stopped her tonight,’ Redondo Coach Tommy Chaffins said. ‘Falyn just took over. What do you say?’
The sophomore sensation, who began playing volleyball at age 7, had 17 powerful kills to lift the Mustangs to a 25-19, 25-18, 25-22 victory over Redondo in the Southern Section Division I-AA Championship match. The section title is Mira Costa’s 15th since 1972.
Fonoimoana said the key to her play was that she simply concentrated on hitting the ball as hard as she could. She didn’t pay attention to what the other team was doing or how they were positioned defensively.
‘I wasn’t looking if there was [a defender] in that spot or not,’ she said. ‘Anything that came in front of me, I went and I got it.’
Said Mira Costa Coach Lisa Zimmerman: ‘She’s had flashes of hitting those high balls before, but never consistently like that. It was like she just got perfect for one night.’
Fonoimoana’s performance was so strong that at one point, the Mira Costa student section began taunting Redondo’s players by chanting, ‘You can’t stop her ... You can’t stop her.’
They were right. Redondo couldn’t.
‘Falyn was unstoppable tonight. She was on fire,’ said teammate Lane Carico, who paired with Fonoimoana in Poland’s sand last summer. ‘She took it to another level. Rarely any errors, it was just kill, kill, kill, kill.’
Or, in other words, perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect.
-- Jaime Cardenas
-- Image from www.darwinsgamecloset.com