Heading into NESCAC's as 6th Seed

Our final weekend of play before the Conference Championships was at Wesleyan and Trinity.  We fought hard vs Wes, but ultimately, they were too strong with too many options for us to combat, and we lost 0-3.  The next day we traveled to Trinity, whom we needed to beat to secure the 6th seed in the tournament.  It turned out to be their Homecoming, so some of our team joined in the festivities by playing some cornhole before the game!  We took town a feisty Trinity Team by a score of 3-1, thus putting us in good shape for the upcoming NESCACs.

By finishing our season strongly, we earned the 6th seed in the NESCAC Tournament.  All things being equal, we were actually really excited about our match-up with Williams in the 3vs6 match.  We had barely lost to Williams early in the season losing 1-3 but having every set determined by only 2 points and extra points at that.  We'd grown a lot over the season, as I'm sure they did also, but we were eagerly anticipating our match with them.

Because Wesleyan had beaten Tufts head to head, they earned the right to host even though Bowdoin had upset Wes for their only Conference loss.  So, we headed back to Middletown, CT for the second weekend in a row, having played them the weekend before to end our regular season.

Williams started out strongly, taking the first set 14-25.  We bounced back and forced extra points in the second set and unfortunately came up on the short end of the 27-29 set two.  That would have been huge if we'd been able to pull out that second set as we did end up securing the 3rd set win 25-23.  Although we fought valiantly in the fourth set, we dug ourselves a bit too much of a hole and ended up losing that final set 20-25.  To give Williams credit, I think they were playing as well as I'd seen them and they went on to make the NCAA's despite losing to Tufts in the semi-finals of the Tournament.  They ended up advancing to the NCAA Regional finals, so our showing against them was actually a good testament to how far we'd come during the season and we have high hopes for next year!

We'll certainly miss our seniors, but we have a good core coming back and with the additions of a new class of freshmen, plus hopefully having a fully healed Caitlin and Steph back in the gym, we're feeling good about a bright future!