One quadrangular into the season, the Lawrence High volleyball team has one quarter the number of victories it totaled last season.

Of course, that feat was easy to accomplish since LHS went 4-31 the previous year.

Lawrence's Sara Coon (9) spikes against Olathe North's Courtney Aguliar. LHS beat O-North, but lost its other matches Thursday at Lawrence.

The Lions opened their season Thursday at the LHS gym with a victory against Olathe North, but dropped their following matches against Olathe South and Shawnee Mission Northwest, leaving coach Jo Huntsinger and the Lions less than pleased.

“We fully expected to be 3-0 out of this quad,” Huntsinger said. “We’ve made some improvements this year, and we’re not satisfied with coming out 1-2 at all.”

Through the first four games, the Lions looked like they would go undefeated, topping Olathe North, 15-2, 11-15, 15-9, and taking the first game against Olathe South, 15-8.

Lawrence scored the final five points of that game and carried the momentum into the second, taking a 4-0 lead.

The Falcons scored the next 13 points, helped by 10 hitting errors by the Lions, and won the game, 15-8. They then won the match with a 15-9 victory in the final game.

Lawrence had hitting problems again in its match against SM Northwest, scoring two of the final nine points in the first game and losing 15-9, 15-8.

“It was pretty inconsistent,” Huntsinger said of the team’s play after its first match. “I don’t know that I’d call it a let-down, but we definitely played in spurts the entire night and that’s just not going to cut it in this league or in this state. We need to be consistent throughout the entire quad and that’s something that we’re going to definitely work on this week in practice.”

For all the inconsistency shown by the Lions, Huntsinger liked what she saw when the team was able to put together a run of its own.

“In the spurts which we were playing well I liked our passing, our communication,” she said, “and our hitters were running good routes and putting the ball down. Then we’d be in those other phases of the game where we couldn’t get a pass and we couldn’t keep the ball in play.”

The Lions also had problems serving, including six service errors in the final match, which Huntsinger wouldn’t attribute to the team’s first competition of the season.

“These are high school kids,” she said. “They’ve been serving since the seventh grade and it’s expected that they can put the ball on the court, but also on this level that isn’t really good enough. We have to serve to very specific areas and serve aggressively.”

The Lions will take part in the SM North quadrangular at 5 p.m. Thursday in Overland Park.