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Santa Clara, ranked No. 18 in the preseason poll, opens its spring sand season at Stanford this weekend. Its first match is vs. USF on Fri., March 6 at 3 pm. The winner will advance to play the winner of the Stanford – Sac State match on Saturday. Cal, Pacific, San Jose State and Saint Mary's will also play in the tournament that runs through Sunday.
Earlier this week the Bronco head sand coach, Bronco associate head coach Aaron Mansfield, sat down and talked about this weekend, the expected line-up and what he likes about the sand game when the team plays indoors.
SCU: You have been practicing for almost two months in the sand, starting January 6. What is your practice like each week?
AM: We practice four days a week and then we give them matches to play for the weekend. Usually our sessions range from an hour and a half to two hours. We're definitely ready to play another team right now!
SCU: Have you set your pairs for this weekend?
AM: Nikki Hess and Kirsten Mead will be our No. 1 team. Sabrina Clayton and Danielle Rottman will be our No. 2. GiGi Cresto and Jensen Cunningham will be our No. 3 seed. Sarah Vaccaro and Katrina Inch will be our No. 4 team. Our fifth team will be Mary Shepherd and Kaity Edwards. And if there is an exhibition match, Gianna Ruggeroli and Natasha Calkins will play that match.
SCU: What are a couple things you'll be looking for this weekend, the first weekend of play?
AM: In speaking with the USF coaches, they said they are battling some injuries so they've had a hard time fielding 10 athletes to compete. We know three or four of their players are from Europe so we're not sure how much sand experience they have. But we know all of their players are good all-around players. We expect it to be a battle. We're just excited to put on a Santa Clara jersey and compete against another school as a team.
The last two years Pacific's had a really strong sand program. A lot of their indoor girls make up their sand team. They do a good job training. They've been a tough out for anybody the last two years. Cal is in the second year of training sand-only athletes so those athletes train eight months, nine months out of the year just on the sand. It will be interesting to see how competitive they are. Stanford's one of the top indoor programs in the country and a lot of those girls are playing on the sand. We expect them to be very good. They do have a couple sand-only kids but the majority of their teams are made up of their indoor players who are all highly athletic and very skilled so the competition's going to be really high. A lot of these Northern California teams train the right way. They are going to be extremely competitive so we're looking forward to seeing where we fall on those eight teams.
SCU: Santa Clara is No. 18 in the preseason poll. Has the team been ranked in the preseason prior to this year?
AM: We haven't been ranked in the preseason so that's nice for our program. We had some significant wins last year and that helped with that ranking. We had a pretty good showing in Hermosa with a lot of teams from Southern California as well. We return nine of the 10 players that competed for us last year.
SCU: How much does it help that you and Matt Lyles played sand volleyball professionally?
AM: It helps with the details of the game. Anytime you're teaching a lot of general fundamentals that are extremely important, it helps a lot in sport if you have done it at a high level. We've been able to get into the intricacies and the nuances of different defensive schematic things. Matt was very good at using this vision as an attacker and that's something that, unless you've played and you've really used it yourself, that's a hard thing to teach. We feel like since we've played the game, we understand more of the intricacies and the details of the sand game along with the basic fundamentals.
