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This weekend Santa Clara's sand volleyball team, ranked No. 16 nationally by DiG magazine, will travel to Southern California to play in one of the top sand tournaments this spring, the USA Volleyball Collegiate Challenge. The Broncos, 6-2, will face No. 1 Southern California, 15-0, at 10 am on Sat., April 11 and then follow that up with league foe, No. 14 LMU, 2-8, at 1 pm.
Later Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday the Broncos will compete in a pairs tournament as part of the USA Volleyball Collegiate Challenge. Other teams playing this weekend include No. 2 Hawaii, No. 4 Pepperdine, No. 6 Long Beach, No. 18 Grand Canyon, USF, South Florida and Concordia.
On Monday Bronco head sand coach Aaron Mansfield (AM) talked about this week's practice plans, the difference in playing in the sand at the beach vs. sand at a man-made court as well as this weekend's competition.
SCU: After posting a 3-1 record in the last couple of weeks in Northern California competition, you are set to compete down south this weekend. First, talk about this week's practice plans.
AM: This past week our volume of volleyball was pretty low. We did that on purpose so we could work hard this week. We will have two pretty long practices to prepare for Hermosa to get their stamina up as well as working on our side-out game. In deep sand it's imperative that you continue to side-out back and forth as it's harder to score real points on defense because it's hard to move efficiently in the sand to dig balls. Because of that, we're going to spend a lot of time on our passing and setting as well as our attacking and leading up to it.
We will work to get video of the teams we are playing so that way we can go in with a game plan instead of the unknown. We will continue to maintain our strength and conditioning with our Sparta workouts.
SCU: What's the biggest difference between playing at the beach and man-made sand courts?
AM: The biggest difference is the depth of the sand. With deeper sand it's harder to move laterally, harder to jump, and at the end of the day, you have to expend more energy to play the game. Along with expending more energy because of the surface, the temperatures are hotter at the beach. In addition at the beach, there's the weather element and you have to deal with wind, maybe more than we've had to deal at other sand courts that are at parks. It's really just dealing with elements that make it more challenging to play the game, but I think our girls will be ready.
SCU: This tournament is probably the best tournament you're going to play all year by far with seven ranked teams and another team receiving votes just out of the top 25. What are your goals this weekend?
AM: We want to play faceless opponents. We want to treat USC the same as Sac State, our last opponent. We know that they're two different teams, but we don't want to make a situation bigger than it already is. At the end of the day, it's volleyball and if we take care of our side of the net like we know how, we feel like no matter who we play we put ourselves in a good position to win. We're going to go through our same routine and preparation when we play USC as we did against Sac State. The same goes for LMU. We want to stay consistent with our approach of stepping into the sand against these teams. It doesn't matter what jersey they're wearing. We feel like if we're in the state of mind we need to be in then we give ourselves the best chance to win.
SCU: From a skill perspective, how is the team growing in the last couple of months?
AM: We've gotten a lot of touches on the ball which is always an important thing because it's a touch skill sport. We will continue honing in on how to use our forearms and our hand to play the ball is always a positive thing from transferring from outdoor to indoor. The biggest thing we are learning is the mental grind of knowing that it's just you and one other person on the court. We have some girls that get served more than their partners and for them to be able to deal with that on a consistent basis will be helpful when we go back indoors. All of our girls' ability to deal with failure faster has been really good and move on to the next play, which is something that we promote and talk about a lot with our program of mental toughness. The last thing is the communication between each team has really improved as to how to figure out during a match how to beat a team and adaptations that you have to make in order to win the match. And so our communication is getting not just better but more specific and I think that we're dealing with failure a lot faster and a lot more efficiently.
SCU: Okay. Anything else you want to add? Just really looking forward to the tournament?
AM: This team likes to travel and we have a very tightknit group that gets along really well so we look forward to these trips. We think it's a good thing to play at a place that we don't usually get to play and we try to get as comfortable as we can with that atmosphere. We talk a lot about being good on the road and what it takes to be good on the road. We have to find ways to get into our routine and feel as comfortable as we can. Indoors we play nine WCC matches on the road and all those matches are extremely important. It's extremely important to get into your routine and feel comfortable and familiar with where you're at. We look forward to going to a different place and competing. A place that has some adversity to the sand, the wind and the sun and playing against good teams and we embrace things like that as a group.
