By Don Gromala
Head Coach
There is a lot going on with our team right now getting some stress from outside influences. It is life-stuff, and that can be good in that the player are learning that they have each other’s back and they are seeing that they are all here for each other. That is good because quite a bit can happen during the course of a season.
I think we are being helped by the balance between experienced players and newcomers. The older players have been through things the younger players haven’t, and the older players can help the younger players get through some things.
I think the retreat helped. That trip to Ohiopyle helped everyone get closer. The trip to College of Charleston was also a great thing. We had the opportunity to take a historical carriage ride through Charleston and with that we have talked a lot about appreciating where we have come from as a program. It was a good parallel between Kent State’s volleyball program and the city in terms of Charleston being burned down a couple of times and then rebuilt. It’s pretty cool that Charleston is still standing strong.
We have been working very hard on defense for the past few weeks, and this was a very good weekend for us defensively with holding our opponents to a very low hitting percentage. Defensively it is usually a little easier than offensively early on because people are getting used to playing with each other again and we’ve also been getting used to a new offensive system.
It was an interesting tournament in Charleston. It was what we were looking for with nothing too difficult and nothing too easy. The defense improved throughout the weekend. Mercer exploited a few weaknesses in our defense that we were able to work on and get better against Davidson and College of Charleston. We worked on that the first few days of practice this week, defending tips and roll shots. That’s kind of how Mercer beat us. It wasn’t aggressive stuff, which we should expect. If we are blocking well, teams are not going to be swinging aggressively on us because they don’t want to lose points against our block.
Offensively, we haven’t gotten into too much yet. We were so-so last weekend, but we had a shining moment in the fifth set against College of Charleston when we hit around .500, which is awesome. Hopefully our girls learned from playing smart offensively. Our hitters took risks when they should have, and our setters made some good decisions to get us one-on-one opportunities when we could get them.
With a freshman setting, it could take a month or so to really get firing. We are going to mix up our lineups again like we did this past weekend. We may start with an entirely different lineup this weekend in the Hampton Inn Golden Flashes Volleyball Classic because we know we have a lot of different options. We want to find out what really works best for this group. It’s not going to be based on wins and losses, but how the team plays together and what things we’ll need to compete in the Mid-American Conference. It’s a long preparation, which is going to be different for us. They have to be a little more patient this year as players with regard to playing time and what their role is on the team.
I’m enjoying mixing and matching things and seeing what the best fits are. We have a couple of different lineups, one that is good offensively and one defensively. Can we do two different lineups throughout the season? Probably not, but it would be fun to have that option because it is tough for opponents to scout.
We’ll play Evansville at 1 p.m. on Friday, Morehead State at 7 p.m. on Friday and then New Hampshire at 6 p.m. on Saturday. It’s funny because this past weekend we wanted to play teams that bring some different things, which they did. Some teams ran a 6-2, some ran a 5-1 and did different offensive schemes focusing on different types of hitters.
Evansville in game one will do some different things from what we saw this weekend. They run a faster offense, to their outside, to their right side, to their middle it is really fast. That will stress us out a little bit. We are a pretty physical team at the net. We are also athletic, but we haven’t seen that type of speed since last year when we played Southern Illinois.
It looks like Morehead State is similar to us where we have an option for a lineup that has two middles in a three-hitter rotation so that you can run two quick sets at a time.
Evansville is similar to us in that they are trying to build their program up and they have a chip on their shoulder trying to prove some things. Morehead and New Hampshire have been to the tournament. They have been in big games. So when the games are close, they are not going to fall back into a shell. We showed a lot of that same resolve last week, and now hopefully we can do that again in front of our home crowd.
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