August 28, 2011

Out to the West

The first weekend of competition has already come and gone. We took an extended trip out to Wyoming and Montana with both our JV and Varsity. Our JV team played in a tournament at Sheridan College while the varsity team went to Billings, MT to compete at Rocky Mountain College.

The JV team competed hard all weekend and did well considering 6 of the 8 players that were there played out of position. They played 5 matches during the weekend and had some opportunities to take a couple of sets but kind of stalled out at the end of those particular sets. Assistant Coach Dannie Burt coached them all weekend and said that there were a lot of bright spots from Paige VandenMeerendonk who was being forced to play in the middle rather than on a pin where she is more comfortable. There was also a big moment when 5'5" Lacey Reimnitz (playing LS, out of position) went up and crushed a kill down around the 15 ft. mark for a point in the first match of the weekend. They said that you could see the cape behind her as she flew in the air to take the swing. LOL.

Great job ladies.

The varsity team had what we would consider a roller coaster weekend with only one major drop. Fortunately that drop came in the very first match of the year against MT Tech. That's all we'll say about that one. We have decided to go out of sight, out of mind with that match. We then played MT Western and started off slow, most likely an hangover from the previous match, but somewhere in the middle of the 2nd set things picked up with communication and energy level. We still dropped the 2nd set but we could feel a change. That change came out a 5 set match win with some great performances from Larissa Veldhuizen and Danielle Bird. Check out the stats from the online schedule.

We woke up the next morning feeling better about our chances and came to face nationally ranked Rocky Mountain who in the previous weekend had beaten two top 10 teams in straight sets while out in California. We knew we had our hands full. It was a match of big runs, they had a 8 to 9 point run then we had 7 to 8 point run, each team had big runs like that in every set. Although we lost in straight sets we actually built more confidence in ourselves as we continued to look back at how the match was played, we blocked well and forced a team much bigger than us to have to use more tips and roll shots to get points. We also put a lot of pressure on their serve receive passers keeping them out of system for a majority of the match. We finished the weekend off by playing MT State-Northern, who had been playing extremely well all weekend long. It was a hard fought match with us losing the 1st set, winning the next 2 but dropping the 4th. We went into the 5th just feeling as if we have controlled nearly every aspect of the match but just let our focus slip a little in the 4th set. We came out and took control of the 5th after the 8 point switch to win 15-10. It felt amazing to leave the weekend with a win and to have a great feeling from a vast majority of the sets we played.

A lot of confidence is bubbling as the team enters into the first week of September and hosting our own Corn Palace Classic. Check out the schedule for the tournament here.

It is a good start to the season. We expect to continue this climb with confidence over the coming weeks to prepare us for the difficult GPAC schedule ahead.

- COACH V