Bobcat Libero Nicole Baker Blogs on a Recent Trip
4/17/2012 4:00:00 PM | Women's Volleyball
Bobcat libero Nicole Baker blogs on the recent episodes of her trip to the Wazzu Spring Tournament
This past weekend (April 7) marked the advent of our second spring volleyball tournament at Washington State University. For those not versed in the intricacies of the NCAA volleyball rules, any tournament scheduled in the spring season must be traveled to by bus, and although the Montana landscape is undeniably beautiful, it provides quite the barrier us athletes must traverse in order to reach our intended destination.
Spring bus rides usually average around seven hours, and the shenanigans we amuse ourselves with on these drives prove quite entertaining. In the past, it had been tradition to watch episodes of the television show Friday Night Lights to pass the long hours. Alas, certain member of the team protested the practice this year because they had become undeniably obsessed with the show, and had spent too much money buying multiple seasons of it on DVD (these players will remain unnamed).
This time around, we stuck with some casual movie watching, but when this didn't provide quite as amusing during hour number 3, I voiced an idea: that we should assemble a mid-bus blanket fort. After a solid 20 minutes of building, we had created quite the proud blanket fort near the back of the bus. Mysteriously though, I fell asleep for a couple of hours and awoke to find the blanket fort had been destroyed by an unknown villain (I highly suspect a certain head volleyball coach).
Anyways, enough about our traveling activities, lets talk about the volleyball.
Our first opponent was Seattle University, whom we defeated in both sets. This game definitely did not showcase the pinnacle of our volleyball playing abilities though, and I specifically remember botching an easy freeball pass, causing a coach to ask me, “have you played volleyball before?” Our next match versus Boise State was significantly better, and we defeated them pretty readily in two sets as well. Up next was Central Washington, another team we beat in two games, albeit by a much closer margin of points than we would have liked.
One of our main focuses this spring has been to maintain a high level of volleyball play throughout entire matches, and near the end of this one, we fell off our game a little bit. This couldn't be allowed against our next opponent Idaho. We ended up dropping the first set to them 21-25 due to this exact reason. The second set featured far superior volleyball than seen earlier by our side, and we handedly won.
Our last game of the day was the one that we were most excited for, a single set competition against a PAC-12 Washington State. We played them extremely tough, holding the lead for much of the set before late game errors turned the game 27-25 in their favor.
Overall, we went 7-2 in sets on the day and left Washington feeling decently happy with our performance, although left with a hunger to improve enough to win against a PAC-12 team that seemed well within our grasps.
Wednesday, January 18
Monday, November 15
Saturday, September 04
Friday, September 03
