EYEBRONCO: click here to see the video preview of the weekend
The Santa Clara volleyball team will play in its final non-conference tournament this weekend, travelling to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo to play UC Santa Barbara, Northern and Illinois and Cal Poly.
The Broncos are 8-2 this season and lead the country in service aces per set. They are also No. 4 in hitting percentage and No. 7 in team service aces nationally. Early in the week, Bronco head coach Jon Wallace (JW) sat down to reflect on last weekend and to look forward to this weekend. Catch up with him below.
SCU: Last weekend you played your first two home matches this season in the Leavey Center.
JW: It was great to play in the Leavey Center after our 10 day road trip. It took us a bit of time to get comfortable on our court against Penn on Friday night. It was a really good test for us and it set us up really well for our match versus Duke on Saturday morning. Our team came out and played with tremendous energy and grit.
SCU: The Duke victory, who was ranked No. 20, was a total team effort. Can you point to a few players that really played well?
JW: I'm really pleased with the play of Taylor Milton, Sabrina Clayton and Nikki Hess. I thought all three of those girls handled a big load. It is nice to see Kaity Edwards play extremely well for us offensively and she got us out of some trouble with kills at the right time.
Kirsten Mead settled down on Saturday and really played to her ability. She has a ton of ability and will be a really good one for us going forward. She set the ball extremely well, she ran her offense and she attacked for a high clip and kept them off balance all morning so I thought she did a really nice job.
SCU: Your team had a lot of energy in the match. Did the bench help them with that?
JW: The whole atmosphere of our team on Saturday, the approach from all 17 girls was very strong. They all had great energy. Our girls on the bench were into the match - supporting, helping and cheering and ready to go in. All 17 girls were ready to go forward to get the result we did and a 3-0 win was even more gratifying. It was just a great weekend all around.
SCU: The team traveled to No. 1 Stanford on Saturday night and lost 3-0.
JW: Stanford played really well, probably one of their better matches of the year, so I give them a ton of credit. That group has been together a full two years longer than our group. We have some players that will be able to compete and we are definitely on our way to making a good run at this thing.
SCU: Was it a learning experience for your team or a negative?
JW: To go up there and to play that game was excellent and a great experience for our girls. We did some facets of the game real well and other ones not so good. But we will take that as a learning opportunity and we have already addressed some of the needs that we need to get better at this week for practice and we will get better at it.
SCU: What will you do to continue to improve this week?
JW: We will watch some film; specifically our Duke match and most of the things we see for improvement come out of the Duke and the Stanford match. Nikki, Sabrina and Taylor carry a big load for us, but they have to remain focused on their serve-receive first before they have to go into attack or block. It is just understanding the heavy load they carry and put it in its right compartment, so they have to attack first the pass and I think that they got ahead of themselves and our passing suffered for it against Stanford.
Offensively, we think we can get better. We will continue to watch film with Kirsten and talk about some decisions we need to make. We want to make sure that she stays aggressive at certain times. We have to continue to develop our middle attack with Lacey Maas and Kaity Edwards because to keep the balance that we need to have to stay successful those two need to play a big part in it.
SCU: This weekend is your final preseason tournament and also the final week before the team heads back to school next Monday. What will you do to make sure you make the most of this week?
JW: This is the last week that we will be able to watch film in the middle of the day. We need them to have a great percentage of improvement this week more so then when school starts because other things start to come into play. We know that we need to do a lot of teaching this week and demand a lot from our girls because when school starts instead of maybe learning three things in a week maybe only one or two things can get done. But we will kind of load them up pretty heavily this week to get better.
Playing in the Leavey Center last weekend was awesome and we're really excited going forward into this next week. Our girls are extremely motivated to just get better everyday.
