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Week 8, Spring Semester 2014
We played in our first Spring tournament on Saturday at West Point, the army campus and we played 3 teams. Dowling and Malloy (Division 2 schools) and the Army (Division 1). We beat Dowling and Malloy and tied with the Army 1-1. The games were 2 sets to 25.
This week was a recruits week where we had recruits most days, they observed our practices and a couple would stay overnight with us.
We play Syracuse this weekend, they are a highly ranked Division 1 team, so our practices have been based around a shortened conditioning session at the beginning of practice (which has also changed!) to more scrimmages and practicing plays.
We added some exercises at the beginning where we practice our blocking footwork across the court, we sprint to half way and have to broad jump/slant jump as far as we can (expected to make the sideline!), another is that we lie on our backs, and have to roll over, get up and sprint the court and slant step at the end and stop and hold our landing and we do mountain climbers then without standing up have to slide and roll, get up and sprint to the end of the court.
We have still been working with serving through hoops and aiming to improve our accuracy, and our speed of our serve is also being measured now and we have to be serving at our maximum speed in order to get anything out of the drill, and our distances have changed to serving from 20 feet, 20 feet and 30 feet.
There are rumors that the hoops are going to be replaced with smaller ones soon!
We have stopped the competitive drills as such for now and have started to work on plays, wraps and hitting different sets, working on our shots, practicing seeing through the block at the defense, where they are, and hitting away from them. Playing smart and not just swinging every time!
Today, (Friday 4th of April), we had a recruit who is on an official visit so we stopped practice an hour early in order to do open gym (no coaches) for the last hour so she was allowed to join in and train with us!
In regards to lifting, we have started our fitness conditioning, we are now sprinting 4x25 yard shuttles, last week we did 6, this week was 8, and it goes up 2 every week.
Our fitness tests consists of 16 of these, under 21 seconds with a minute rest. We get tested in the fall in preseason when we come back from break!
