Volleyball splits weekend matches
The women manage to stay atop division despite up-and-down week
Casey Cheney
Issue date: 10/8/09 Section: Sports
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After defeating Grand Valley State University in four games on Friday night, they were revisited by last week's ghosts, losing their Saturday match against Ferris State. Grand Valley is 5-3 in the GLIAC. Ferris State is 6-3. The home crowd once again packed out the stadium for the Friday night game, which sophomore Morgan Podkul said helped energize them as a team.
"You can feel the energy coming from the crowd," she said. "The bigger the crowd, you just feel more into the game.We just have to maintain that ourselves even if we don't have a big crowd."
The fan base only added to the pre-existing rivalry between Hillsdale and Grand Valley.
"We always have a rivalry against Grand Valley," she said. "Just going from previous years, we come in with an attitude of 'take no prisoners.'"
Head coach Chris Gravel said in Friday's games, the girls "stayed together" but "the execution was okay."
"We were missing some of our primary responsibilities," he said.
Gravel said their execution didn't improve in Saturday's game against Ferris, and the team did not play nearly as together.
On top of that, he said Ferris State played a solid game, a fact his players also noticed.
"We just didn't execute at the end. It felt like we just had six players on the court rather than seven, eight or nine picking up everything," Podkul said. "Ferris played really well and brought their A game."
The team was really pumped up for Friday's game, but sophomore Apryl Shmucker said she thinks energy dropped after that.
"I think Saturday we just let down and... didn't feel like [Ferris] was as big of a game. We didn't stop them right away if they went on scoring runs, and if we were ahead we wouldn't quite finish it."
Shmucker said unlike Friday's game, the Charger defense didn't put up "quite as solid of a block," and the Ferris State hitters kept hitting around the defense. Also, she said, the Chargers servers were only getting on our two serves in a row, making it difficult to mount any kind of comeback.
Podkul summed up the game: "I just think that we felt like nothing was coming together. They ended up pushing and wanting it more than we did."
Next weekend, the Chargers travel to play Saginaw Valley State University, who has the same conference record at 7-2, on Friday and Lake Superior State University on Saturday. To prepare for the games, Gravel said the team would look over game film and examine what to expect from their opponent. The other plan: simply work harder in practice.
"I think we're just going to hone the mindset that we're going to work really hard to improve in practice," he said.
The key, Shmucker said, for victory against Saginaw Valley and Lake Superior is to play with the same togetherness as they did in the beginning of the year against Wayne State. "That's when we do our best."
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