Results/Commentary
3/15: Millersville 3, Philadelphia U 1
At Brooks Gym, M.U. (25-21, 25-17, 29-31, 25-11)

John's Commentary: "We were ready to go on Spring Break, so we decided that the guys on the court would wear headbands to celebrate the '80s.  That was neat.  Hopefully we'll be able to come back from break in some kind of playable shape.  Three weeks until Nationals."

Coach's Commentary
:  "I wasn't at this match - but I had the (mis)fortune of watching it on videotape. It's obvious from watching the tape that the team was ready for Spring Break, which started the next evening. In fact, if I hadn't seen the individuals on the tape, I'd have thought some of them had already left for break :-)

It was a long run of rough practices and tough matches from our first practice on Sunday, January 21st to our win at Messiah on Wednesday, March 7th. Our schedule let up considerably in the last two weeks, what with essentially a week's worth of practices wiped out by the non-Blizzard of the Millenium, and four matches against teams that were off our "radar screen".

But those matches can be the dangerous ones. Philly U. came in looking for a big win. The East is traditionally the weakest of the MACVC divisions, and it is easy for the West Division teams to take them for granted. Looking at the tape, it appears as if we took for granted that the ball would fall on Philly U's side of the floor more often than ours due to some type of mythical selective gravity field in Brooks Gym.

We hit .175 as a team, with our starting outside hitters combining for a "blistering" performance of .018 (57a-17k-16e) - can you say OUCH!! boys and girls - I knew you could... But let us not lay the blame solely on the offense - the team, as a whole, "gave" Philly U. 46 of its 80 points (58%) on a combination of hitting errors (20), ball handling and serve reception errors (18), and serving errors (8).

Contrast that with the points that Philly U. "gave" us, 32 out of 104 (.31%), and it's not hard to draw the conclusion that we worked pretty hard at trying to "give" the match away. And yet, the match wasn't even close. The first game, we held a 23-13 lead, and then "coasted" home (as we've been wont to do all season). And, in that same game, the scorekeeper missed a point for us that would have trimmed the final score to 25-17, matching the blow-out in the second game.

We did find a way to get everybody on the court during the match, and the third game was another opportunity for "next year's team" to get some quality time on the court in a competitive situation. We extended the game to 29's, before dropping it on a hitting error.

In the fourth game, apparently in retribution for some Philly U trash talking in the third game, the full complement of Ville starters ran off a 9-0 lead on Nate's serving, and thus began a spate of wholesale substitutions, which led to a further drubbing, with a final score of 25-11. Nate served 11 of those points, including 6 aces - totaling 10 aces on the night, versus 2 errors.

In fact, the bright spot of the night was our serving, with 17 aces versus 8 errors - pretty good for 4 games. And even though our overall offense was atrocious, John Wagaman continued on his recent tear, and had his most effective match of the season, hitting .529 (17a-11k-2e), while collecting 5 blocks. We continued to build the "Great Wall of Ville" by stuffing 12 Philly U hits on the night - maintaining our solid 3 blocks per game average. And Tracey, our venerable Libero, was the bright spot at outside hitter in the third game, at .625 (8-6-1). With stats like that, he'll be seeing more time at that position.

So - we closed out the first half of the season with another win, and ran our record to 14-3, 5-0 in the West, 12-0 in the MACVC, 13-0 against D-II competition. So far, we have reached and/or maintained every one of our goals for the season. The four weeks following Spring Break are the true meat of our schedule, though, with four big weekend tournaments, including Nationals and MACVC Championships, and we have Dickinson in a West match on Monday (3-26), SusQ on Thursday (3-29), and we close out the West (and our regular season) when Messiah comes to town next Wednesday (4-4).

We'll find out rather quickly just how well the first half of the season prepared us for the tests we have yet to face in the second half."