What's better than candy on Halloween? TWO five set wins!

The team battled this weekend to post TWO five set wins over conference opponents Linfield and Pacific.  Again, we showed our strengths in different ways each night---learning a bit what's it like to leverage different phases of our game to find a way to get that "W".

This week in practice we focused on communication, and tinkered with our warm-up to provide more spark, more energy and a better overall early engagement with match intensity.  Taylor A sparked her team both nights with a very solid setting performance, and perhaps most importantly, a lot of communicating with her team as she found a rhythm running the offense.  She showed a lot of growing maturity in spreading the ball around, running plays we work on in training, and trying to implement what we want from our offense.

Friday night we kept pace with a very scrappy Linfield team in playing some good defense on our side of the net.  Our very strong block showed up to help us as we registered 14 team blocks for the match! Our hitters started to find a rhythm Friday---working hard all match long, and it was really the combination of a strong all-around court effort by Jillian, hard work in the middle from Olivia and Corie paying off, and Carrie adding a good number of kills in the OH2 position that kept us pushing forward.

Saturday it was more of the same---but we showed signs of a team finding a very good sideout game---smoothly and confidently running our offense, and winning some of the tough defensive transition swings.  In the final fifth set we sided-out at 90%! That's preeetttyy effective.  And something that makes a coach happy.

Again our defense was solid, we served tough most of the night, our passing game improved as the match wore on, and our hitters rose to the occasion.  The Alaskan duo in the middle took the night with two of their strongest offensive performances---Corie hit .333 on 21 swings, and Olivia lit up the court with a .556 hitting performance on 18 swings making no errors.  Despite some pretty painful shin splints, Olivia played with a tenacity and determination to get the job done for her team.  Becca and Jillian combined for 37 of the team's 68 digs.

Today is a great rest day for us, and the team is headed tonight to help out at the YMCA for Halloween as part of an overall Whitman athletic service day!  Photos hopefully to come.....