Sports
She's Pho real
Roxy Photenhauer brought the heat on the Pho to spark LCA's comeback with sizzling serves.
By Michael Ashcraft --
Some like it hot.
Lighthouse fans were savoring the Pho on a hot streak on Monday.
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After a lackluster Game 1, Lighthouse Christian Academy gave Junior Roxy Photehauer the ball and told her to serve up some spicy noodles. The next five serves were too hot to handle for the Panorama High School Pythons.
"Roxy's serving was great. Her digs were also good," says sophomore Frida Macias. "This was one of her best games. She was ready every single time."
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LCA pulled away and cruised to a comfortable three straight wins thereafter.
Roxy typically plays libero. But since LCA was missing a key player due to injury, Coach Jessica Young thought to put her in the normal rotation. It didn't seem to work as well.
After Game 1, Roxy confided to Coach: "I just want to dive for a ball."
She changed jerseys and came out with some graceful lunges that looked like Tarzan swinging through the jungle. Panorama had a hard time finding the floor. "We won everything with her as libero," says Coach Jessica. "She was hungry to get the hard balls."
Then she came up for serves and fired off some sizzling hot serves.
It was LCA's first game against a public school since anyone could remember, and maybe the girls were intimidated by the a gym bigger than they've seen full of Panorama students cheering their team. The gym -- honoring their mascot, the python -- bears the words: "Welcome to the snake pit."
"I think they were slightly intimidated," says Coach Jessica. "Everybody was off."
Sophomore Dahlia Gonzalez was hitting long. Others were hitting the net or out of bounds. Only sophomore Allie Scribner, the team's setter, was throwing herself all over the floor to make saves and setting up plays. She had been nursing a wrist injury all week and got prayed for. Mysteriously, the pain went away, she says. As a result, Allie played with a vengeance.
The Saints lost Game 1 22-25.
In Game 2, however, things were different. Dahlia began hitting in bounds. Allie, Frida and Dahlia hits some blazingly hot aces. Accordingly, the Saints won 25-11.
Game 3 went 25-15 in LCA's favor, and Game 4 was 25-
Read about LCA's other games:
Michael Ashcraft teaches journalism at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica.
