By: Ohmer Bautista
Though Motolite bolstered their Final Four bid with their second win at the expense of PacificTown-Army on Sunday, head coach Air Padda admitted that entering the next round is not yet a priority.
For now, the American mentor doesn’t want her team thinking too far ahead. She also cautioned them to take the remainder of the PVL Reinforced Conference preliminary a step at a time.
“Honestly, we aren’t thinking about the Final Four right now,” Padda bared.
“We’re literally just taking this one game at a time.”
Motolite were once the cellar-dwellers of the tournament, as they went winless in a four-game stretch. Crawling their way up from the abyss, the youth-laden team are now just 1.5 games behind fourth-running Banko Perlas.
And their five-set escape act against the Lady Troopers, as Padda believes, provided them that “stepping stone”.
“We knew that this was like a stepping stone,” she bared.
“I told them that if we can get through Army, we already got better in a week,” she continued, as Motolite also picked up their first back-to-back wins after notching their breakthrough victory at Bali Pure’s expense, before stunning their opening-day tormentors in five sets.
Now that they are on the right track, the youth-laden team is starting to pick up steam.
But most importantly, as how Padda puts it, “It’s easier to just have a positive attitude about everything when you’re winning versus like when you’re losing.
“I’m really happy that we started the second round on a high note, and we’re just going to keep building.”
