Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Midd Drops First Conference Match, Goes 2-1 on Weekend

The Bowdoin match was a tough one to lose.  We were competitive, but not quite all together enough to pull out the victory here in our Home opener.  The stats and writeup can be found here:  Bowdoin Match.  I'm sorry for the lack of details, and late write-up, but I'm playing catch-up myself, and getting prepared for the weekend. Mel lead all players in blocks with 8, and Becca and Isabel lead the team with double digit kills.  Hannah led the team in digs, while Becca continued her strong stand behind the service line getting 2 aces.

The following day, we rebounded well to win both of our non-conference games.  Cortland State proved to be a very formidable opponent despite our early success with them.  This is the first time we've beaten Cortland State, who has often been an NCAA regional opponent for us in the past.  We cruised out to a 2-0 start behind strong play on our side, and many errors on theirs, only to find ourselves in a 5th set an hour later.  It was a very long match, but worth it when we pulled out a 15-13 5th set on a decisive block by Gabi and Eliana.  We weren't terribly sharp, but we did what we needed to do at crunch time, in the very end, anyway.   Again, Becca led the way with 20 kills, while it was Gabi's turn to lead the team in blocks with 6.  Hannah had 4 service aces and Charlotte had 16 digs for us in the long win.

We seem to be still finding our way, which is fine, as long as we keep taking steps forward.  Here are the links to those matches as well:  Cortland State, and Colby-Sawyer.  Colby-Sawyer didn't pose much of a threat, however, all of us that were here for our pre-game vending machine escapade which resulted in a 5 set loss to them last year had some revenge on our minds.  We played very disciplined volleyball and that was good to see.  We had a plan and we executed it pretty well, which we'll need to do moving forward. 

Tonight we go up to Burlington, VT to play St. Mikes in a mid week match.  They are a Division II team that's playing very well right now, so this will be a good challenge, and will be good to prepare us for more Conference play this weekend when we travel to Hamilton.

No comments: