Just like the St. Louis Shock did on Friday, the New Jersey 5s (10-3, 30pts) responded to an unexpected loss with dominant performances when they next took the court on Saturday.

After falling to the Utah Black Diamonds in a DreamBreaker on Thursday and a day off on Friday, New Jersey came out on Saturday and achieved 4-0 sweeps of the SoCal Hard Eights and Chicago Slice.

One of the keys for the 5s was Meghan Dizon’s return to the lineup after missing Thursday’s contest with an illness.

Having no matches on Friday also gave New Jersey the opportunity to fully take in the loss and evaluate how best to move forward as one of the top teams in MLP.

“I think it was a good opportunity to talk with the team and to go over things that worked and things that didn’t,” Anna Leigh Waters said of the day off. “On Thursday, there were obviously some things that didn’t work, so we were just trying to problem-solve and fix it. Zane [Navratil] did an amazing job as team captain to kind of get us together, sit down, and talk about some things that maybe we wouldn’t want to talk about without him.”

In the team’s second match of the day against the Slice, Zane Navratil/Will Howells found themselves down 0-5 to Chicago’s men’s doubles pairing of James Ignatowich/Max Freeman.

From there, though, they scored 11 of the next 12 points to come away with an 11-6 victory and keep New Jersey in the driver’s seat going into mixed doubles.

“It’s a game of runs, as we all know. Teams can get hot, especially teams like Max and James who have good drives and quick hands. So, we just had to not let it bother us and make some adjustments,” Navratil said of the comeback effort. “I think we do a really good job of adjusting our game plan throughout a single game to 11, which isn’t an easy thing to do. It’s not a large time frame to even identify trends and adjust as a result of them, but it’s necessary. We buckled down, executed, and we were able to turn it around.”

The 5s will close out their campaign in the Sunshine State on Sunday with matches against the New York Hustlers and Carolina Hogs.