March 31, 2006
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina volleyball team will head to Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday for the first of three spring tournaments. USC will square off with Coastal Carolina and East Tennessee State at 9 and 11 a.m., and then take on College of Charleston and Miami (Ohio) at 2 and 4 p.m. Each match will consist of two 30-point games.
“Our spring training has gone well so far,” USC head coach Nancy Somera said. “It’ll be good feedback for us to play against someone other than ourselves. We’ll see some things we don’t see on a daily basis, and it’s an opportunity to defend against some different offensive schemes and attacking styles.
“It will be important for our team to make adjustments because in the practice gym they know their teammates so well that they anticipate what the others will do from the start. They won’t know certain things up front against a different opponent. We have to make adjustments during the match and it’ll be interesting to see how we do that.”
While Somera and her staff have been working on many technical aspects of the game over the past three weeks, they have also been stressing the mental aspect of volleyball as well.
“One of our goals has been to carry our training mentality into a competitive situation,” Somera said. “We’ve been telling them they need to compete with the same training temperament. We don’t want to let competition change our temperament. The way we want to play volleyball is through habit. It doesn’t matter if we’re playing a match for a championship or for nothing. We want to play one way: engaged. That’s what we’ve been practicing.”
Coastal Carolina was 19-12 last season, while East Tennessee State went 18-14. Charleston went 32-2 in 2005, running the table in the Southern Conference with an 18-0 slate. Miami (Ohio) recorded an 18-13 mark last year. The Gamecocks were 13-14 and 5-11 in the SEC in Somera’s first season, but wins and losses are not a concern for Saturday.
“It will be a successful day if we walk away from those four matches having dealt with anything we were faced with in a manner that allowed us to maintain our team identity,” Somera said. “We need to face whatever challenges come our way and keep playing the way we have the past three weeks.”
South Carolina will have eight members of its current nine-person roster available for Saturday. Playing for the Gamecocks will be Shonda Cole (Sr., 6-1, OH), Alexcis Thomson (Sr., 5-10, DS/S), Iris Santos (Sr., 5-10, S/OH), Crystal Johnson (Jr., 6-0, MB), Marija Milosevic (So., 6-0, OH), Dinelia Concepcion (So., 5-3, L/DS), Petra Lorenzi (So., 5-9, S) and Belita Salters (So., 6-1, MB).
Lynae Vanden Hull (Sr., 6-2, OH) is still rehabbing a knee injury suffered against Clemson last season. She is expected to play in two weeks when South Carolina hosts a tournament.
