Lipscomb’s volleyball team will begin the quest to improve on last year’s successful season at the season-opening Utah Classic in Salt Lake City this weekend.
And the challenge to improve on last season is not an easy one, since the Lady Bisons won the Atlantic Sun Conference and recorded 21 wins and 9 losses, finishing ranked No. 39 at NCAAs a year ago.
Having that second best rank in the Lipscomb volleyball program history places a lot of expectations and added pressure to do even better this year, according to some of the freshmen.
“There is definitely pressure, the women’s volleyball team has always had a pretty good past, so coming into the season you just have that automatic expectation from the coaches and teammates,” freshman Carlyle Nusbaum said.
The Lady Bisons have added six freshmen this year. Carli Anderson, Calayci Coffey, Hannah Hutcheson, Lauren Anderson, Marcella Emmanuelli and Nusbaum were recruited by head coach Brandon Rosenthal, who said all the new players performed at a high level in club and high school volleyball.
“They are all very explosive, which suits our game style and program,” Rosenthal said. “They are still very young, so the experience level needs to improve, which will come from playing a lot of matches.”
The new players said that in addition to experience, they believe team bonding is essential to success.
“We do a lot of team building activities, trying to build close relationships with each other, because that makes such a difference when we play together,” Hutcheson said. “We have worked really hard as a team up until this point just to be competitive with all the different schools that we play. We can scrimmage all day long, but putting it together against a different team is really cool.”
The team has been training since June, and the freshmen said they are eager to hit off the season.
“These last two days we have been training really hard in practice and preparing well for what’s to come,” Emmanuelli said. “I’m really looking forward in seeing all our hard work paying off during the season and in our games. All of our hard work is going to pay off when the time comes.”
The Lady Bisons will play No. 46 CSUN Matadors at 5:30 p.m. Friday followed by two Saturday matches against No. 97 Idaho State Bengals at 1 p.m. and the No. 37 Utah Utes at 8 p.m.
Photo courtesy of Lipscomb Athletics