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 Liz Rondone's third blog of the season. |
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Sept. 4, 2007
The ride home from the SMU tournament in Texas was long after the 0-3 finish. It did, however, give us time to gather our thoughts and focus on the tournament ahead of us at UNC Asheville. The first game of the Parkway Series would be played on that upcoming Friday and we had a lot of work to do to improve.
We spent the week catching up with the school we missed and homework in between weights and practices. Missing classes, due to traveling, is not as exciting to student-athletes as it may be to others. This just means much more work must be done outside of the classroom and more notes to hunt down from fellow classmates. This is all has to be completed on top of the homework assigned for the present week.
During practice we spent as much time as possible correcting mistakes made in the previous weekend. Every coach has certain drills saved for when they really feel they need to make their team work harder. Players know what these drills are and dread the day when their coach decides to use one.
We experienced that every day this past week. Due to unimpressive serving stats we spent our practices doing a mixture of our "yellow chair drill" and our "pressure serving drill." This consisted of a chair placed in each deep corner of the court, creating a square with the boundary lines. Every player had one chance and one chance only to serve the ball in the marked area. It did not matter whether the ball was served out of bounds or out of the specified zone, we all would be given a punishment if there was an error. The more players who missed, the more conditioning we had to do. Our coaches envisioned a goal for us and we had to do this drill everyday for 40 minutes until we met it.
Finally we were ready for the UNC Asheville tournament this past weekend. On Friday we faced the Bulldogs whom, too, were waiting to experience their first win. We went into the game serving tough and swept them, and went back to Cullowhee with our first victory. We returned to Asheville the next day to face USC Upstate and Kennesaw State. USC Upstate produced a big block but we were able to hit around them and beat them in only three games. Kennesaw forced us to pull together as a team when the fatigue from back-to-back matches started to affect us. It may have taken four games to do it, but we walked away with our third win and tournament champions. We were led by the impressive performances of freshman Jelena Jakovlijevic, who was the MVP, along with Meredith Harmon and Katie Hennessey who made the all-tournament team.
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