The week off we needed

We've already played 3 weeks of the season and now it is time to truly prepare ourselves for conference play. Once again the season has been on the hectic side of things with our roster.  We started the season with 16 players for both JV and Varsity, not how we normally would like to be at for roster size.  We knew that we would be using a lot of players with both teams and that both teams would also be relatively young. However, we are excited that most of our sophomores and juniors have quite a bit of playing experience at the varsity level.

We have started the season a little on the rocky side with each weekend tournament having to use a completely different lineup due to injuries, player departures from the team for medical concerns, and other reasons not under our control.  All of these changes have led us into some inconsistent play at times but we are feeling very positive at how many times we have played at a very high level more times than in years past. We have had numerous sets where we have hit over .220 and the amount of errors we give up are much less than previous seasons; we are also excited that our defense has stayed relatively steady with averaging just around the 15 dig per set mark.

This current week is a very important week for us.  We do not have any matches during this week or weekend; so we are using it as a time to really focus on skill development and situational volleyball.  There are some points in time during matches that we have plateaued and this week of practice will focus on staying keenly focused to push through those moments. This time frame will also allow some of our players time to recover from some nagging injuries to be at full strength for the conference opener on Sept. 17.

We will be looking to get all of our JV and Varsity home matches online in some form or another.  We have a Ustream.tv account that we are looking to use; it is the DWU Volleyball Channel.  We will hopefully have a link on our web page in the schedule as well as on our Face Book page and Twitter page (both are labeled DWUVB).

We are looking to begin our conference portion of the season.  The GPAC conference is always tough and with 4 teams ranked in the Top 25 this week from the conference we know that each match will be a great test for our players.

GO TIGERS!!!

-Coach V