After losing nine seniors last fall, the Juanita volleyball team has some new faces and definitely looks a little different, but that doesn’t mean the goals aren’t the same.

The Rebels, just points from making its first ever team state appearance last fall, aim to finish the project this season.

“We want to go to state. We have never been,” said returning head coach Teena Bambolo. “Last year was sickening, we were points away from state. We just don’t want to be team No. 6. Five teams go from our district and we should be in that top five, if we can stay healthy.”

Returning to help the Rebels obtain that goal is senior outside hitter Dana Michels, and junior setter Jade Finau, both keys to the team last year, and the Rebels captains.

Despite the team losing a lot of players last year, Bambolo said she has talent this year, it’s just fitting new pieces into the puzzle and finding where things gel together.

“We definitely have talent, it’s just getting it to all work together,” she said. “We’ve been doing a lot recently in the pre-season on team building, stuff away from volleyball just to get them to know each other.”

Michels said one of the captains’ goals is for the team to trust each other and work together, which will bring the team together and then the wins can follow.

“We are working on consistency and being there,” said Finau.

For their coach, working on fundamentals has been a key in the early season.

“Honestly, I think fundamentals are the most important,” said Bambolo. “It doesn’t matter who is in your league or who they have, it matters who is the strongest and soundest fundamentally. It matters who is going to win the serve receive battle. There is a statistic that if you win the serve receive battle 51 percent and they win 49 percent, you win 85 percent of your matches. That’s like a 2 percent differential but that’s all it takes. We’re doing a lot of serves and serve receive. That’s getting us ready for game one.”

To get plenty of serve receive practice before the season begins in earnest, Juanita is hosting a tournament on Sept. 17 at the high school. Teams from across the state are coming for the one day, 16 team tournament. Bambolo said she’d organized the tournament once before, but with two young children it was tricky to do again until now.

“I think we’ll do it every year, but I just had to wait until my kids were a little bit older,” she said. “It’s teams from all over. We have 16 teams in the tournament, we could technically do 24, but I shut the doors for this first year. So from all over, which I’m really happy about because I didn’t want teams in our league because we already see them so much anyway. It’s going to be fun, I’m excited.”

Games will begin at 9 a.m. at Juanita with pool play for the teams.

“It’s a pretty early tournament, so I wanted the teams to get as much playing time as possible to work out the quirks,” said the coach.

The Rebels will get their first chance at league play on Sept. 8 against Samammish, before hosting Mercer Island on Monday, Sept. 12.