First spring scrimmage

Last night we had our first spring scrimmage.  It had been over 4 months since our last competitive match so the girls were ready to play and beat up on somebody other than themselves.

Our matches last night were against the Baylor Club Volleyball teams.  Traditionally, Baylor has one of the strongest club programs in the country, with both teams combining for five Final Four appearances nationally and twelve overall top 10 finishes.  These matches would give us an idea of where we are and the aspects of our game we need to improve on.

Our first match was against the Baylor Gold team.  Our team came out very, very motivated and won game one 25-14.  I was able to mix and match line-ups in the next two games and we won both of those 25-17 and 25-20.  Both of our setters, Haley Goldwater and Michaela McNeely were able to get in a lot of reps and we even tried a 6-2 with Michaela swinging, and I thought that went well.  This versatility gives us options for next season.

The next game was against the Baylor Green team.  To give you an idea of what level of play they are, their record over the past 3 years is 93-12.  They have multiple athletes on their team that had Division 1 offers to play volleyball but chose for one reason or another to come to Baylor.

We started out a little slowly and I called my second time out down 17-11.  It was a good wake-up call for us because every time we did not attack the ball hard over the net, it came back faster at us.  It was like we were throwing off speed pitches and they were hitting home runs.  We started to play much more aggressive and made a nice run to tie it at 24, but we lost 28-26.

We continued our level of play into game 2 and jumped on them early.  We actually were up 24-19, but Baylor made a nice run and we escaped with a 25-23 win.  To put this in perspective, this was the first set that the Baylor team had lost since December.  Game 3 was also very close.  We lost 16-14, making a few too many serving errors and hitting mistakes. 

Overall, the improvement that our team has made since the end of last season has been tremendous.  Our athleticism has improved a lot and as a result our blocking last night was great.  I believe we had about 15 blocks against the Gold team, and the balls that we didn't block we slowed down for our defense to pick up.

Now that we've had some competition, we can keep improving for our next spring tournament, which is Friday April 1 at Brookhaven.  This will give us a chance to see how much we've improved compared to other junior colleges.  We have 8 returning sophomores that are playing now so we are setting a great foundation for next season!

Until next time...