Photo: Steve Galluzzo
By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor
Winning the Silver Division championship at last weekend’s Chatsworth Invitational was thrilling for the Palisades High boys volleyball team, but beating archrival Venice in the finals made it even sweeter.
Piloting the Dolphins in the first stage of pool play on Friday at Birmingham was assistant Phallynn Hill, a former star libero at Los Osos High in Rancho Cucamonga who went on to play collegiately at Rutgers, graduating in 2019. A P.E. teacher at Pali High, she is grateful for the tutelage of head coach Carlos Gray.
“I tell him ‘you’re like my Yoda,’” Hill said of her mentor, who she started working with during the girls season in the fall. “I watch how he analyzes the game and adjusts to what he sees.”
Palisades opened the tournament with a sweep of Cate, then outlasted Cleveland to set up a showdown with Canyon to determine the winner of Friday’s pool. The teams split the first two sets by identical 25-19 scores before the Cowboys took the third, 15-10. Assistant coach Jeff Nakamura guiding the squad on Day 2 at Calabasas, where the Dolphins finished 1-2 in pool play and dropped to the Silver bracket. They beat Calabasas and Oak Park to set up a finals meeting with the Gondos, who had beaten Palisades twice in Western League play. Venice led 25-24 before the Dolphins reeled off three straight points (the last on a block by Kirill Deev) to prevail 27-25.
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