Sports
Ladyjacks sticking together through growing pains
Matthew Semisch
09/02/2014
First-year Dakota College at Bottineau (DCB) head volleyball coach Allison Scherr said before the start of the 2014 season that one of her team’s goals for this year would be to foster team chemistry and togetherness.
So far so good on those fronts, all things considered
That’s been made all the more important due to the fact that the Ladyjacks’ early results largely haven’t gone DCB’s way. After being swept at home on Wednesday by intrastate rival Bismarck State (BSC) and winning one of four matches last weekend at BSC’s Labor Day invitational tournament, DCB currently owns a 1-4 record on the still very new campaign.
The Ladyjacks’ season officially opened on Wednesday night in Bottineau in front of a large estimated crowd of 1,500 at the Woodshed. BSC made sure to do its best to silence the Ladyjacks’ legion of supporters, though, and a 3-0 victory over DCB did the trick pretty well.
The Mystics opened the match very convincingly, rolling to a 25-12 win in the first set. DCB then fell further into trouble when BSC dominated the second set, too, and won that one by a 25-9 count.
During the 10-minute break between the second and third sets of the best-of-three match, Scherr said she noticed something in her team that she hopes will be a mainstay for the Ladyjacks through the season.
“We decided in that break that we weren’t going to give (the match) to Bismarck as easy as we had been,” Scherr said. “We were letting them set up, and they have very good hitters and we were giving things to them too easy in terms of letting them set their hitters up.
“I feel like we really got a lot better as the night moved along, and our girls fought and I’m very proud of them for that. They fought for everything, and I don’t think any balls dropped without an effort on our part.”
The Ladyjacks came back onto the court clearly re-engergized, and they were building up momentum early in the third set. BSC held up well, but DCB forced the Mystics into some mistakes early in the frame and went into a BSC-called timeout up 12-9.
That break gave the Mystics the breather they needed, though, and they took the game over once the match resumed. Facing that three-point margin, BSC went on a 9-0 run and eventually won the set 25-18 to put the match away.
Despite the disappointing result, Scherr took heart in her team’s ability to pick itself up as the game went along despite it not usually going the Ladyjacks’ way.
“We can only go up from losing all three sets, and we can only get better, but I was very impressed at our girls’ resilience,” Scherr said. “We hit the floor there about halfway through the second set when it was 2-8 and you could tell from the looks on our faces that we thought we’d already lost, but I was proud of them for coming out of that and coming back into the game a little bit.”
“We obviously didn’t win, but we held it together and I thought we finished well, and that’s important.”
DCB then traveled to Bismarck last weekend to take part in the Mystics’ invitational tournament. The Ladyjacks picked up their first win of the season in the round-robin competition but also dropped three other matches.
On Friday afternoon, they were swept 25-23, 25-14 and 26-24 by Lake Region State before losing 25-19, 25-17 and 25-22 to Williston State. The following day, DCB beat Gogebic Community College (Mich.) 25-20, 25-23 and 27-25 before falling to BSC 15-25-25-12.
The Ladyjacks face Williston State on the road this Wednesday before visiting Thief River Falls, Minn. on Friday to square off with Northland Community and Technical College.