By Don Gromala
Head Coach
We had a great weekend with the wins over Morehead State, New Hampshire and Evansville. The level of competition was really close where we could very easily have gone 0-3 or 3-0 like last weekend, and we played very steady volleyball overall. But right now we are not looking as much at the wins and losses.
We thought we would play well offensively last weekend with the lineups we played. That happened through execution and players taking care of their business and doing their jobs. We still have some offensive areas to adjust, though.
I thought we did a better job of defending the middle and right-side attacks, but we haven’t seen a strong outside presence from a team yet. Physically, West Virginia is going to pose some new problems for us this weekend that we have not seen so far this season. We may still try one more different lineup this weekend at West Virginia that utilizes a 6-2 offense.
We didn’t tinker as much with the lineups as we did the first weekend but we still gave players opportunities to get in. We have talked a lot about the depth we have and how that means everyone has to be ready. You may get your chance and it may come in the fifth set. You have to be ready to produce when that chance comes, just like Lauren Engleman did the first weekend vs Charleston.
The lineups we try at West Virginia may give more people an opportunity to play, but hopefully girls understand we are not trying to make everyone happy with playing time. It’s about what is going to make us better in a month and a half since we are getting close to the start of that Mid-American Conference season.
In addition to getting better match by match this past weekend, I was very happy with the decision making of our hitters. We had a well-balanced offense, and we can still get better as all of our setters locate the ball a little more consistently for those hitters.
Serving is a little bit of a conundrum for us right now. We are making too many serving errors. You can have mistakes serving as long as you are scoring points off of them, but we are not scoring enough. We serve reasonably tough as a team and I think we serve smart, but we also have a strong defense which means we don’t have to score off of our serves. We just have to keep it in play and let our defense and counter attack do the rest. We have options with our servers, and that is something nice even for something as simple as serving. With our middles, we can have either Bridget Wilhelm or Liz Reikow serve, and they are both tough. They have very different serves that pose different problems for passers. The same goes with Sarah Mills and Kelly Hutchison, who have different types of serves that can create different opportunities for us defensively.
We face West Virginia at noon on Friday, Saint Francis at 4:30 p.m. on Friday and then Montana at 2 p.m. on Saturday. After that we host Youngstown State Tuesday, Sep. 16, then go to the Tiger Invitational at Towson University next weekend to take on Towson, St. John’s and North Dakota.
After that, it’s right into the Mid-American Conference season at Ohio University on Thursday, Sep. 25.
It’s hard to believe we only have two more weekends of non-conference. I’d love to try a few more things and look at a few more options before the start of the MAC season, but I feel like we are growing and we are building towards being an extremely competitive group. We have to make sure we don’t plateau after having a successful weekend though. The girls need to stay focused and keep pushing to make themselves better.
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