Learning from last week and a look ahead to Akron and Buffalo

By Steve Bailey

Assistant coach

Both Ohio University and Eastern Michigan played very well in our games with them last week. Ohio perennially a team to beat in our conference, obviously, and they did some very good things and played us pretty tough with their home crowd. Eastern Michigan did a good job of keeping themselves in control. Whether we were serving tough or making changes in our defense, they did a very good job of playing a consistent, clean game. We just weren’t able to do the same thing and that’s why they came out on top.

Because of that, this week in practice is going to be focused more on us and what we need to do in terms of ball control and movement to put ourselves in a better position against Akron and Buffalo. Akron is playing very well. They had a very good weekend, and Buffalo is 12-4. Both teams are very good, so we will have to bring our A game to go 2-0 at home.

Akron comes to the M.A.C. Center at 7 p.m. on Friday. Having a big crowd for that Wagon Wheel Challenge point will help us. Our team really does well with a lot of noise. Most of the teams we have played this year said we do a really good job of bringing high energy and being very loud already. Our kids feed off of that, so I think being in the atmosphere for the Akron match will be good for us. The energy level will already be there, and if that is a good match it can slingshot us into Saturday at 7 p.m. for Buffalo. It would be nice to get a good crowd for that as well because we need all of the home court advantage we can get against these two teams.

Akron doesn’t run a very complex offense and they don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Ron does a very good job with them of being very simple, very basic, but executing at a high level. They hit high. They hit hard. They don’t make many errors. To beat them, we have to make sure we don’t make many errors on our side and control the ball better. If we do that, it will be a good competitive match.

Buffalo is very similar. All three teams, Akron, Buffalo and Kent State, are really very similar. They all have two good outsides. They all have a good middle and a pretty solid setter. It’s just a matter of who puts their players in the best situations.

We have a good, friendly rivalry with Akron. As coaching staffs we get along pretty well. We have all known each other through the recruiting world. Our staffs interact and can hang out with a competitive banter going back and forth. We understand that with our schools being seven miles apart there is going to be a natural competitive rivalry. But it is a healthy competition where both teams want to win, both want to say we have a hand in that Wagon Wheel Challenge. 

Winning in the Kent State-Akron rivalry obviously also helps with recruiting. We are both recruiting the same kind of kid. There are probably three or four kids out there who have offers from four or five MAC schools, including Kent State and Akron. If we can say we beat Akron that’s a bonus for us on the recruiting side.

Ready to start the MAC season at Ohio University

By Steve Bailey
Assistant Coach

I think we are in a very good place right now as a team.

Our new additions, the incoming freshmen, are playing an impactful role.

This is going to be an interesting year in the Mid-American Conference. Every team is playing well as we get ready to start conference play. Thursday will be a very good test to see where we are in the MAC.

Ohio University is a great team. They are 7-4 after playing a very tough non-conference schedule. It is similar to us in that we have played a very competitive preseason where we have done some very good things, getting better defensively, getting better at blocking, and now we are trying to get our offense to catch up. We think this could be a very good season for us, and we are looking forward to seeing what this weekend has to hold.

Ohio is a very simple team in that they are very good at the basics and don’t do a lot of crazy things. They pass very well. They have excellent attackers and they play very well defensively. We are going to have to play a near-perfect game to come out on top. For us, that means taking care of ourselves, focusing on our side of the net and not worrying so much about what they are doing so that it is a clean match on both sides.

No place like home

Note: The Kent State volleyball team competed in a tournament at Towson University this past weekend, providing senior outside hitter Tinuke Aderemi-Ibitola with an opportunity to play near her hometown of Ellicott City, Md.

As the long 6-hour drive down Towson began, I started to play ridiculously cliché songs on my iPod like, ‘Coming Home’ by Diddy, while I contemplated in my head if this is how LeBron felt returning to play in Cleveland (obviously not, but I still like to think me and him have a connection now).

It was hard for me to contain my excitement and contain the huge smile on my face to a gentle smirk, so I decided to fall asleep. We arrived at a hotel in Timonium, just 25 minutes away from my house, I couldn’t wait for the next day to play and see all of my family and friends.

Throughout the three games over the weekend, I would look up in the stands to see so many familiar faces. My parents, older brother and sister, high school volleyball coach, my uncle, parents of old teammates I played club with, random high school classmates, all came up to watch us play. It was unfortunate that our games ended in a loss, but you can’t stay mad for long when you walk out of the locker room and your brother is standing there with a half-deflated smiley face balloon connected to boxes of edible arrangements.

After all the matches were over, I got the rare opportunity, playing so close to home, to bring the team to the my house to eat dinner. After a short drive down to Ellicott City, I stepped out of the bus with an image of my father standing outside the front door, with the biggest smile I had ever seen, clapping, welcoming us home. We all walked through the house while some of my teammates stopped to stare at random baby pictures and old family photos, finally ending the tour in the backyard where we decided to play a game of ‘add on.’ The game ended pretty suddenly as Heather almost (accidentally) sat on a baby bunny in the heat of the game.

Luckily, the food arrived shortly after as silence fell across the backyard are we all scarfed down half chickens, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, cinnamon apples, cookies, brownies, until we couldn’t eat anymore. Soon after, it was time to head back to Kent. A few hugs and goodbyes later and we were off.

One more new lineup and another challenge with YSU here tonight

By Don Gromala

Head Coach

One of the the things we faced this past weekend at West Virginia that we had yet to see this season was a fast offense. West Virginia and Montana played a very fast set tempo to the pins. That stressed us out a bit. 

Offensively, West Virginia is the best team we have faced this year because of their system and the fact that their setter was very smart.

We grinded out some wins, though. St. Francis was close, and we battled back to win the last three pretty easy. We were down 2-1 to Montana, too, so it’s good to see we have that comeback in us.

Tonight is going to be tough. Youngstown State poses some similar stresses we’ve seen with double-quick offense and fast tempo. They have had a new staff come in and they have become a much better team over the last couple of years. They have some good wins beating programs like Virginia and Illinois-Chicago. 

Youngstown State poses a challenge because of the style of offense they run, so if we are serving too easy or losing too many points on our serve, it will be tough for us to defend them. 

It’s a Tuesday night so we should have our students here. Youngstown State will bring some fans, too, so it should be a good crowd.

We will have a different lineup again tonight. That will be our eighth different lineup. Last year we had two-to-four different lineups where this year we could have eight-to-10. Players are getting opportunities, and that’s good. 

Tonight is also a an opportunity for returning players to make up for last year when we struggled at Youngstown State. We will come out to prove we are a better team and to keep our home streak alive. 

This weekend we will go to Towson. That will be very similar to tonight where we will face some teams that have jumped out to a good start. Towson has only lost a couple of times. St. John’s has been to the Hawaii tournament, where they played some good teams and beat New Mexico, which is a very good program. 

Last week was tough with the scheduling of two matches on a Friday that were four hours apart. We do the same thing this weekend, and we play tonight. It’s a good opportunity to prepare for what we would see in the Mid-American Conference tournament when we could play four days in a row. 

We are also talking a lot about maintaining our focus. In our first segment of non-conference play we have started out strong. How are we going to finish this month with these last four matches? It’s a lot about mental focus and doing all of the little things right so that we don’t have to go back and retrain the basics before the MAC season starts up.

Improvements on offense during home tourney win and a look ahead to West Virginia

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. 

 

Lessons from Charleston and a look at the Hampton Inn Golden Flashes Volleyball Classic

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.