Thursday, January 18, 2024

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!



Monday, January 8, 2024

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!!


Wednesday, January 3, 2024

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!



Monday, December 18, 2023

Post Season NCAA Run Takes Us to Baltimore


Despite not advancing to the NESCAC Championship game, we earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament!  We ended the season ranked 2nd in New England, and earned the 3rd seed for our Regional at John's Hopkins University, playing Manhattanville in the first game. 
 Because of the extremely long drive, we practiced early in the morning before classes on Tuesday, and then departed after the last class that day for NJ.  We stopped along the way to pick up Thai takeout--our preferred dinner on the road, and then went on to NJ to spend our first night.  

Then we went on to Baltimore where we checked into our second hotel (and where we would call home for the next few nights!)  We practiced at the facility that day and then went out to dinner at Cava, which was new to me but even better than Chipotle!  Our hotel was nice, and we had some down time to finish work, and because it was the final week before Thanksgiving Break, we had a few players who needed to take exams while at the hotel, so I proctored a couple of those and people finished up work and we prepared for our NCAA run!

Friday, December 1, 2023

In-Season Birthdays!




During the season, we celebrated four birthdays with three players and our assistant coach, Brian.  First up, we had Kelly on the 11th of September.  Followed at the end of the month by Brian, whose wife Sylvie baked us all celebration cupcakes after our Tufts victory at home! 


And then we had Steph on the 10th of October and I baked the gluten free, vegan chocolate cupcake recipe that we all agreed was surprising good!  I recreated it for Gabbie's birthday on Nov. 1.  

I'm not sure how we missed taking a photo of Kelly's birthday, and then Gabby Pribisich had her birthday right after Thanksgiving, but we were no longer practicing together, so we didn't celebrate it together, sadly.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Season Work Culminates in #3 Seed for NESCAC's



One of the bonus features of a longer pre-season is that we get to help out the Middlebury HS volleyball team with some practices and skill building.  We also partnered with them to raise awareness about mental health and change the stigma to being one of understanding.  This partnership with the newly formed Varsity HS team is a very rewarding experience for our team and for their young team as well, so it's a wonderful, shared experience expressing our collective love of the game of volleyball.



Once we actually started the season, we played a tough non-Conference invitational at Kean University.  We played the hosts to a 1-3 defeat on Friday night and battled a tough Gettysburg team to a heart-breaking 2-3 loss on Saturday morning.  However, we capped off the tournament with a convincing 3-0 sweep of SUNY Cortland, who would go on to only lose 3 matches all year and all three opponents that weekend would go on to make the NCAA Tournament in November.  That first weekend, we were striving to find a groove and a lineup that would be successful.  We had our veteran setter, Gabbie and a strong defensive lineup of senior libero Kelly and senior DS Britt.  We had returning starters and fellow seniors Katie and Lexi, but Lexi was coming off an injury from last year that followed her through the summer, but Katie picked up where she left off and was our leading returning point scorer...until we discovered our new freshman phenom, Molly!

We knew Molly could be a hitter, and a good one, but our most pressing need was a practice setter, and she was very good at that also, so we recruited her to be our setter (and hitter), but quickly found out that first weekend that we'd need her to set in practice but HIT in games!  She emerged from that first weekend as a dominant hitter for us getting double digit kills in every match except the first where she only played one set.  We were playing different OH's all the time trying to find the right combination, and three emerged from the weekend as the main contenders, with Katie leading the way and sophomore Lillian and freshman Lauren coming through in the Cortland match with 11, and 9 kills respectively to cement their places in the running for that spot.

Our first NESCAC match saw us lose somewhat badly to a seasoned Williams team 0-3, but we went on to sweep Amherst the next day and then take down a tough Hamilton squad 3-1 after they had narrowly lost to Williams 2-3 the weekend before.  We then went on an 8-1 run with impressive sweeps of Tufts (electric match at Home!!) and Eastern Nazarene and were drawing a great HOME crowd which made for a really fun environment at home!  

We went over to Skidmore to play a couple of tough non-conference foes in Clarkson and Rochester and scored a 3-1 win against Clarkson, who is a perennial power in NY.  However, we suffered another heart-breaking 2-3 loss to Rochester of the UAA Conference.  It was a game of spurts, and although their head coach got tossed in the 4th set (which we went on to win, forcing a deciding 5th set), we couldn't quite finish in the end.  We got behind early but staged a significant comeback being down 7-11 and then taking a commanding 14-11 lead, but just couldn't get that final point and lost 14-16.  Devastating.  Our serving was a huge reason for our success at this point in the season and it seemed to be improving as we went along, which was great to see.  Our receive was also a strong suit of ours to aid our offense that was becoming more and more balanced with both Ava and Lexi (and Gabby) emerging as strong forces in the middle and with Molly on the right side and Katie and either Lauren or Lillian on the left, we were becoming a force to contend with.  


I want to note, however, that because Molly stormed onto the scene with impressive hitting and shut-down blocking, Steph was relegated to playing fewer minutes as our only lefty RH but was very quietly crushing it every chance she got and went on to hit an impressive .429 for the season to lead the team in hitting %!!  Also, this was the first year EVER that I was the ONLY one to dress up for Halloween!! Thanks to Kelly Bevere, I had a "Bull suit" to wear but I couldn't believe that no one else dressed up. 


After a nice home stretch, we hit the road for two more NESCAC weekends, going first to Conn and Bowdoin and then right back to Maine the next weekend for Colby and Bates.  Conn and Bowdoin was a great weekend.  We held off a feisty Conn team in a hard-fought sweep, and then swept Bowdoin the next day with the 2nd set being a 25-7 rout!!  Unfortunately, Kelly suffered a concussion during the Bowdoin match, and although she finished that match ended up missing the next three weekends of play.  Colby handed us our second loss in Conference and then we swept Bates in a competitive match.  


Next up for us was the New England Challenge matches hosted by Williams college.  We stayed again at Jiminy Peak Resort, which has become a fun tradition while playing at Williams.  We stay in condos, so the configuration of beds and groups is totally different than staying in a hotel.  Heading into that weekend all three NEWMAC teams were on a roll with MIT ranking in the top 25 Nationally, and Springfield coming in at 25th Nationally and Babson right behind them.  Other than the loss to Colby, we felt like we were playing well and starting really coming together as a team.  We beat Springfield in a closely contested 3-1 match and went on the next day to lose a very tight MIT match 0-3 and then beat a good Babson team 3-1.  Babson was missing some key players so the match wasn't as tight as it could have been, but they still battled, and our team came through with a big win, nonetheless.


That brings us to our final two NESCAC matches of the year, to determine the final seeding for the tournament.  This was also Senior Night, so it was fun to celebrate these four fantastic seniors!  Because they'd changed the format this year, we had already secured a home playoff game being in the top 4 regardless of outcome, but there was still some room to move up...Wesleyan was coming in undefeated in Conference and we played them to a very tough 2-3 loss, but we felt good about how we competed and played a very good team.  Trinity had been having a great season and was also fighting for a spot in the top 4, but we dashed those hopes with a 3-0 win on Saturday to end the regular season.  

So, we finished the regular season 15-7 and earned the #3 Seed for the NESCAC Championship, meaning we'd host a first round game for the first time ever!


Monday, September 18, 2023

Start of Season Fun!

Lots has happened since my last update, so we'll try to summarize things here.  We welcomed our new freshmen at our Team BBQ at my house as our first gathering of the new year.  Fun times, despite the bugs--it was a super wet summer here in VT, so the mosquitos were fierce this Fall!  Pre season was full of practice, meetings, bonding time, and lots of volleyball fun.

The pictures below are of each class, starting with seniors and moving down to the new freshman class.  It's a really fun group and we're enjoying working together and competing every day.  Practices are competitive and fun, so we're improving steadily, which is really fun to see.




 In addition to the pre season schedule of practices and meetings, we also were able to get over to the local High School and help out with their newly minted varsity volleyball program!  Vermont is the last state in the country to add girls volleyball as a sanctioned HS sport, so in town they've spent the last two years as a JV sport until they built up the program with numbers etc, to compete at the varsity level.  Our team has partnered with them and we went over a few days during our preseason and helped out with their practice and taught some new skills to these new young players.  It's a fun connection for all involved!



We also had some time to just relax and recoup from practices, and the cold Otter Creek River was the perfect place for a post-practice cold bath!  Now the season is underway and I'll get some game updates in here soon.