February Graduates: Unique Tradition at Middlebury

 

February Graduation: A Unique Tradition

I hope you enjoye reading about this uniquely Middlebury Tradition!  This year this special celebration was moved to campus due to the extreme winter conditions and high wind/low temperatures warning.  It's a bit more of a "ski down" on the mountain, but for some, the gentle hill in front of the Chapel was probably welcomed!

Here's the write-up in the Campus, our college newspaper.  Feb graduation to continue with some restrictions in place - The Middlebury Campus

Post Season Awards

We had many nice honors and awards this season, starting with the All-NESCAC awards.  We had NINE members on the Academic All-NESCAC Team also, which was great!

NESCAC:

Gabbie--2nd Team All-NESCAC

Britt --All-Sportsmanship Team

NESCAC All-Academic:  

Lucy, Manya, Laney, Britt, Lexi, 

Katie, Kelly, Caitlin and Steph. 

Katie and Kelly were both honored by NEWVA (New England Women's Volleyball Association) and the AVCA (American Volleyball Coaches Association) and Gabbie and Laney were honored by NEWVA.

AVCA:

  

  Kelly was 1st Team All Region

    Katie was Honorable Mention All-Region

    Kelly was Honorable Mention All-American

NEWVA:

    Kelly and Gabbie were 2nd Team All-Newva

    Katie was Honorable Mention

    Laney was selected for the Senior Classic, honoring the region's top seniors.

Kelly joins a very select group of MCVB alums selected for Honorable Mention All-American, so an extra congrats go out to her for that nice honor!

MCVB Wraps Up 2022 Season with Banquet at Fire & Ice

Always fun to celebrate our season!  I miss the team once the season is over and we don't get to hang out every day.  We have class photos here as well as our Team Award winners.  Our banquet is a time to celebrate our Team for this year, and our seniors.  We keep it pretty simple, because that's who we are, but we had our dinner this year at Fire & Ice Restaurant, which was different but nice! 

Our Seniors got their Middlebury Fleece Blankets with their number's embroidered on it, which I think they all enjoy! Then, we have pictures of each class in reverse order, and the freshmen are awarded the Varsity M for their first year on varsity!

For our Team Award Winners, we had ties for two awards this year.  Our Panther Pride Award for the best teammate went to both Kelly and Lexi (the Black Mug).  Our Yellow Jersey Award (think Tour de France) for consistent daily effort  went to both Campbell and Kelly (the Yellow Jersey.  And, our MCVB Spirit Award went to Britt and she got the pen set for her desk!  

It's always fun to read what their teammates write about them when they're voting and we read off a few of those replies for each person. when handing out the awards.  It was a fun night to celebrate everyone on the team, including my assistant coaches Brian and Jill, our Trainer extraordinaire Beth, and our Faculty Affiliate Melissa.  Thank you one and all for another fantastic season of Volleyball fun!!

MCVB Alums Visit Campus

We LOVE when our alums visit us either here on campus or when we're on the road, so I wanted to highlight a few recent visits!  We had a surprise visit from a couple of somewhat recent alums in Emily Kolodka '18 and Becca Raffel '18 over parents' weekend.   

 

I've already written about some of these others, but to put them all in one spot, Isabella Marcus '22, Shea Golden '21, and Ali Wheeler '22 saw us down at MIT.

And Corley Doyle and Maggie Wise (both '22) visited over Homecoming! 

SO fun seeing ALL of them--thanks for coming and continuing to support
MCVB!!

Additionally, here are a few other photos of Alums who've visited over the last couple of years:

KT Lillich '97 visited over reunion this past June with her son!  And, Jaime Wong Larson '06 visited later this past summer with her son and husband, who is also a MIDD Alum!

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!

MCVB Takes 2nd at NE Challenge!

Next up for us was the New England Challenge against the top NEWMAC teams starting with Babson (then ranked 23rd in the nation), followed by MIT (then ranked #19 in the nation), and then Springfield.  We had a tough 5 setter with Babson last year, and we were pumped to compete with a nationally ranked team.  We arrived in Boston to play Babson on Friday night and came out strong and really handled Babson keeping them under 20 points in all three sets we won.  Our middles were the main story as Lucy was a blocking machine in that game totaling 10 blocks while Lexi led the team with 12 kills! 

A nice bonus about playing in Boston is that it's easier for some alums to see us!  Shea, Ali and Bella all came to see us on Saturday afternoon, which was awesome--always LOVE seeing former MCVBers!!  

Saturday morning we played MIT, who lived up to their national ranking.  They were very tough but we put up a good fight and ended up being the only NESCAC team that weekend to get a game from them!  After our sweep of Springfield in the afternoon, we ended up taking second place because of that one set win vs MIT, so that was exciting.  Both Lucy and Katie were named to the All-Tournament team for their efforts.  Gabbie also had a very strong weekend showing having 36 assists/15 digs vs Babson; 31 assists/2 aces/3 blocks and 15 digs vs MIT; 31 assists/2 blocks/10 digs vs Springfield.  Lillian really is stepping us big for us as well now in the starting lineup finishing the weekend with 8, 9 and 11 kills respectively in the matches.

MCVB Celebrates our Seniors With Two WINS!

 After an up and down start to the season getting us to early October with a 7-7 record, we started to come together as a team, solidifying a lineup that was starting to click after early injuries forced changes often. Our Bowdoin loss at home for our first home court loss since 2018, and we swept an inconsistent St. Lawrence team to get back on track.  Next up for us was our Parents' Weekend when we hosted Colby and Bates.

Covid wreaked havoc on many things, one of which was our initial recruiting classes staying intact.  Although Addie stayed on track academically, she chose not to continue playing, but was one of our biggest fans at home, and Kelly took time off so is now technically a junior, so we had an "original senior class photo" tonight.

Colby was a much improved team and came in with an 11-4 record and a big win over Bowdoin, so we were prepped to compete!  We were really starting to play well together and swept both Colby and Bates, as well as a perennially tough Plymouth State team to finish our home stand with all wins!  It's always fun for the underclassmen to decorate the locker room and put up signs for the seniors, so we wanted to share them with you here also.