Team Celebrates Season with Banquet

Fire and Ice was our location of choice this year for our Team Banquet.  It's always a fun time to come together again and celebrate our season.  There are certificates to hand out from the many post-season awards, but also the Team votes on a handful of awards, and then we celebrate our Seniors!  Our Team Awards winners this year were the following:

Panther Pride "Best Teammate"--Kelly Ferrero

Culinary Logistics--Katie Kraczkowsky (I came up with this one because Katie was such a huge help with the food orders on our road trips!)

MCVB Spirit "Positive and motivational spirit of MCVB"--Stephanie Mayer

Yellow Jersey "Consistent Effort, day in and day out"--Molly Harrison

Then, we celebrated our Seniors with the fleece blanket embroidered with their # and MCVB, and the freshman get their "old school" Varsity Letters!  

And, we can't leave out our sophomore and junior classes!!  The juniors will all be going abroad Spring Semester, and only Caitlin will be on campus for J-term, so the next time we'll all be together will be pre-season 2024!!  Thanks for a great season, Team!

Post Season Honors Abound

 It was a great season overall, and I'm very proud of this team!  We ended with a 16-9 overall record; 7-3 Conference record, good for #3 seed in the NESCAC Tournament.  We also finished ranked 2nd in New England, earning one of THREE at-large bids for NESCAC teams.  In typical fashion after a season like this, we had many people getting honors in the post-season awards.

Once again, this year, like last year, every upperclassman on the team was honored as an Academic All-NESCAC team member.  Freshmen aren't eligible, but to have every other member of the team achieve this level of academic prowess is something we're very proud of!

On top of that, both Molly and Gabbie O'Toole were named 1st Team All-NESCAC, and Katie was 2nd Team.  Then, we had four players make both All-Region and Honorable Mention All-American!!  It was truly a well-rounded team with two of those honorees being seniors, one junior and one freshman! Congratulations to all!

Additionally, Britt was honored by her teammates with her second consecutive All-Sportsmanship nod, so I just had to post her announcement with the picture of her loyal fan club below it!  We had some great fans this year, but Britt may have had the best show of support with these shirts--loved it!!

Season Ends in NCAA Regional Semi-finals

 

After a first round game that saw most people get into the game, we faced a very tough second round opponent in the host school, Johns Hopkins.  Against Manhattanville, Lauren led the way with 8 kills, followed by a trio of players with 6 (Kaite, Ava, Molly), and then Lexi and Steph had 5 and 3 kills respectively.  We led in every statistical category and had a somewhat dominant performance.  It was a great match, and a good start to our weekend!  (It was also my 500th win, which as coaches, we know just means I've been around a long time, but nice to get that milestone with this group in that setting!)  Another bonus of the weekend location was that Jack was close enough from home to come and help us out!  Always great to have Coach Jack back on the bench!!

The Hopkins match was a very tight match, and I felt like we played them very tough, pushing it out to four sets, but we couldn't quite force the 5th set.  We lost a tough first set in extra points 24-26, and won the second set, but couldn't come up with the points to push the score to even in the third and fourth sets.  Overall, we felt good about our performance.  They had one OH that we just couldn't contain who went off for 26 kills, but other than that one player, I think we more than held our own.  Ava led the way with 13 kills, followed by Katie with 11 and Molly with 10.  Lexi had a match high 5 blocks, followed closely by Molly with 4 and Ava with 3.  Kelly also had a match high 28 dig performance, landing her a spot on the NCAA Regional All-Tournament Team!

It's always hard to say goodbye to seniors, and this class really came together and propelled the team to a great season despite some injuries and tough losses.  We will certainly miss them all, but we also have a good core of returning players and a new group of freshmen coming in that we're excited about to continue our growth!