March 23, 2009

Spring Competition

On Friday, March 20th we traveled to the University of Sioux Falls for a spring play date with USF and Briar Cliff. We had 6 team practices leading up to this competition, in which only 2 to 3 of those practices did we have our entire team together to prepare for the matches.

This was a great opportunity for us to see where we were at as a team and more importantly how far along we are with our aggressive jump serving mentality that everyone is developing in our program. I have to say that I was impressed that our serving was solid the entire evening, we forced our opponents into out-of-system offense a vast majority of the time. If I remember correctly there were only 3-4 times during the 3 matches played that we had 3 or more misses in a row, which is very impressive for this being the first time in a true game-like competition atmosphere.

It was fun to see this team on the court again smiling and competing. We used 5-6 different lineups throughout the night to get some players in different positions and others more experience with players they haven't been on the court with before. We still have many things to work on over the next few weeks as we progress to preparing ourselves for the next spring competition that is on April 18th at Augustana College. We focused a lot on our serving and offense these previous weeks to prepare for the competition over the next couple our focus will be serve receive passing and defensive positioning and movement.

We use the spring as a catapult for our upcoming fall season. This team will continue to progress and learn new things about the game everyday. I congratulate them on a successful competition on Friday and I am eager to get going again this week with a new focus on the details.

"If you want something you've never had, you must do something you've never done before"

-Coach V