A long week of Travel

We had a full week off until our next match. This time it was against reigning GPAC champion Morningside.  We felt that we were unbelievably prepared for this match.  We had to adjust our lineup with Sam being out for a few weeks due to her injury.  We inserted Sarah Kruse, a freshman from IA, into the lineup and thought that we had something special with how we knew the match would go with their lineup.  Unfortunately our other starting junior, Rachel Tinklenberg, suffered a head injury while on campus during the day and was not 100% for the match.  Only after the match did we find out how serious the injury would be.  Rachel did play and played very well for most of the match.  As a team we played extremely well taking a set from Morningside to have the match tied at 1-1 going into the break.  After dropping the 3rd we came back out in the 4th with a readjustment to our starting rotations and it paid off. We controlled most of the 4th set had a couple of set points to force the 5th.  However, that lack of killer instinct crept up on us again and we just couldn't put the 1 ball away we needed to seal the game.  I was very proud of the team as we have never played so well against Morningside and I do believe the next match we play them we will win or it will go to 5.

We had to refocus again as we found out Rachel's injury would keep her out for the next few weeks.  We are now facing a part of the schedule with about 5 very winnable matches out of 7.  However, we have to go through it without our 2 most veteran and leading attacking players.  This is the time of the year that we have to show some resiliency and have a lot of freshmen and sophomores raise their level play immediately. Small mistakes are now big ones for us.

We approached the weekend without Sam and Rachel still in a very positive manner. Knowing that our opponent, Concordia Univ., was a team struggling like us to make other teams beat them.  I was so confident in our players and the lineup we chose to use for the weekend that at not one point in time did I think that we could even go to 5 with them.  We found out that we are great team in the middle of matches (like top 35 in the nation good) but at the start of a match and the end to close it out we play with some fear to make the big play.  We were up 2 sets to 1 and played well for 2/3 of the 4th set.  We just couldn't close out the match as we became a little tentative on offense and gave away too many easy chances for Concordia to make a run.  The 5th set did not start off favorably as we did not receive serve well enough to stay in system.  We made a small push but it was not enough to get over the early deficit we gave ourselves.  This was still an unbelievable performance by our team that played with mainly Freshmen and Sophomores on the court a majority of the match. We have heart as a team but are still looking for that clutch performance by any of our hitters.

We have a short turn around as we look into next week and play Mt. Marty on Tuesday and Dakota State on Wednesday then travel to North Dakota for matches against Jamestown and Valley City. We have to find some kind of killer instinct as I do believe that we will put ourselves in position to win each of these matches. Can we finish the job each time is the question.

So the title isn't only about our matches.  We had some bus issues on our way to Morningside that delayed the start of the matches by an hour and half.  We then were supposed leave on Friday night to head down to Nebraska for our match with Concordia on Saturday. As we were waiting outside for the bus we received the call the bus was not going to be able to make the trip.  We then had to adjust our departure to Saturday morning at 6am.  Just not a great week for us with bus travel.

Keep checking our FaceBook and Twitter (@DWUVB) pages for more information. We also have a YouTube page with funny videos of our team. Have a great week.

- Coach V