Click here to see the 2015 Bronco Sand Volleyball Schedule
The Santa Clara sand volleyball team opens the year at No. 18 in DiG magazine's 2015 preseason poll released Jan. 21. Proving the strength of sand volleyball in California, there are four West Coast Conference teams ranked in the top 10: Pepperdine (1), LMU (5), Saint Mary's (7), Pacific (10).
With a week of practice in the books, Mansfield talked with SantaClaraBroncos.com (SCU) about what the team will work on to get comfortable early, how their success indoors will help them and what they are learning in regards to leadership.
Can you open by talking about where you are right now with sand volleyball?
AM: We have a very focused group – we came back from winter break ready to go in the sand. In our first meeting, we talked about learning how to learn more efficiently. It takes self-reflection through the journal writing that we do. The sand game is very different than the indoor game, so the tasks are different.
SCU: What are a couple of areas you are working on early in the sand season?
AM: Because it's a different ball than indoors, the quantity of touches you get on a sand ball are different. You are dealing with different elements like wind and sun. We do a lot of forearm contacts on the ball. We are also learning how to move efficiently in the sand. Your jump pattern is different in the sand than it is indoors, when you want to jump more straight up and down and you want to push the sand down into the ground. Changing direction is also very different in the sand so we talk a lot about body position, how to play defense and how to jump properly in order to maximize our movements.
SCU: You talked a lot about movement and body position. How soon do you work on your offense?
AM: The first month the emphasis is going to be on offense. In the sand you want to trade sideouts and constantly pass, set and put the ball away for a point. It's hard to earn a point on defense in the sand, much harder than it is indoors. With that said, there is sense of patience that you have to have on defense.
SCU: Is it tough to play with just two people in sand after you are use to playing with five others indoors?
AM: It's a daunting task to cover the sand court with just two people. We focus on how to pass and set the ball efficiently dealing with the elements, but also offensively how to put the ball down on the other side of the net. Once we learn that, we can go back and forth with the other team and wait for them to make some sort of error. Defensively, those conversations happen a little bit later because the schemes are much different than it is indoors. There are only two people covering the court, so having one girl understand her blocking responsibility, and one girl understanding her defensive responsibility is very different than indoor. It's not splitting the court in half. But what comes with that is the principles that we teach indoor defense and our eye work, and the same thing is taught in the sand with balance and eye work - you just have more court to cover.
SCU: How do you select pairs? Who will play with who in the spring?
AM: Our taller girls on our team will be considered the blocker on defense, and some of our smaller, quicker girls will be considered defenders. We want to pair a defender with a blocker, so we have been able to identify who we think will be able to block for our team and who will be able to defend for their team. That helps us split the team in half, and then from there we are going to have some different defenders play with different blockers and mix them up. We will also see how they communicate with one another to see what the team chemistry is like. We don't want two people who lack the same things in their skill set playing together. As coaches, there is a lot to look at. We have a general idea of some pairs, but we want to keep an open mind about it for the first couple weeks to see if there are some things that might surprise us.
SCU: Your team really seems to enjoy playing sand volleyball. Is it because of the tournaments you play in on the West Coast?
AM: The girls in the past have seemed to really enjoy the tournaments. We've gone down to Hermosa for the past couple of years. We've also played some of the best programs in the country in Pepperdine, the two-time defending national champions, USC, Hawaii and UCLA. These programs have sand scholarships and train these student-athletes year round for sand. It's a really good measure for where we are at. Last year we competed a lot better against those teams than we did the year before so we are really looking forward to those tournaments because we feel like we can compete at a higher level. We like playing our home matches at Los Gatos High School – the same place that we practice. The girls are excited to get a couple more matches this year in a close environment, in a familiar environment from where we practice.
SCU: What are your goals for this season?
AM: Two years ago we didn't win a match and last year we won seven. Beating Stanford and Cal in duals were two big things for our sand program. We have 16 duals this year and our goal is to win 10 of them. We feel like that's a high goal, but it's also a high standard that we're comfortable with and we feel like we can meet. That goal will push us. This year, more so than the last two years, are that we have a deeper. Our first three teams have been pretty solid the last couple of years and there has been a bit of a falloff. We now feel we can field five solid teams this year. And in order to win a duel in the five matches, those four and five matches are huge. Not only will our first, second and third teams be better because of the experience they have gotten in the past, but we feel like the teams we are going to put for our four and five spot are going to be really good. We feel like we will be really competitive with anybody that we play.
SCU: How will your success indoors this past fall help you outdoors this spring?
AM: Playing No. 8 Oregon at Oregon opened our girls eyes to what it felt like to play on a big stage, not just in an arena, but in the NCAAs. While we didn't perform as well as we liked, getting the feedback from the girls as to how they felt when they were playing and the work that it took to get there. They understand the workload now. And we set a goal back in last January of wanting to win conference and make the tournament and we knew that goal was high and we worked extremely hard throughout the year to achieve those goals. And we achieved some of them and we fell short on others, but what they understood was the workload that it takes in order to achieve the success that we want, and again, that is to win conference. And we've reestablished that goal in our program and the girls understand that getting better on a daily basis starts now. There will be tremendous transfer come August if that's our mentality to just get a little bit better incrementally every single day. And they all know not only what they need to get better at, through our communication, but also how to get better at it. They are ready for it and that they are hungry for it, because the excitement of making the NCAA tournament was there. It was also very fulfilling for them to know that their hard work paid off. There were some physical limits that were pushed in that time period that they didn't think they could do through Sparta. Through long practices, they were able to achieve those things and work extremely hard. They know now they are able to do that, we need to push them even more. They are ready for it. Our goals remain the same and our workload is going to increase, and they are going to be ready.
SCU: Finally – how can good leadership help you as you get ready for sand and think about next year's indoor season?
AM: Danielle Rottman, Nikki Hess and Madison Dutra are working to lead the team now. We are really excited for our team as a whole and their mentality, but what's a little bit different is that we have identified a couple of girls on our team that can do a good job leading on a daily basis. They have contributed positively to our culture for the last two or three years. Madison tore her ACL, but she's still doing a great job of remaining positive and positively impacting and influencing this team on a daily basis. She shows up to every thing and she's a big part of what we are going to be able to do going forward. Having Nikki and Dani be the leaders of this team is going to put us in a really good spot.
