April 24, 2006

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina volleyball team capped off a successful six weeks of spring training Saturday in Aurora, Ill., as the team placed fourth out of 24 teams at the Great Lakes Center NCAA Invitational. USC won three matches and lost one en route to its finish.

The tournament began with eight pools of three teams. The Gamecocks defeated Bowling Green and Wisconsin 2-1 to win their respective pool and advance to the Gold Bracket. From there, USC upended Northwestern 2-0 before falling to LSU 2-0 in the semifinals. South Carolina was unable to play the third-place match against Minnesota because of its travel arrangements.

“It was a great way to end the spring,” USC head coach Nancy Somera said. “We improved over the spring as a result of playing in tournaments and having our opponents expose some things. That enabled us to concentrate on certain aspects of the game in the practice gym.

“We could see we were better in some areas from where we started. We ended with better serve/receive/passing and were able to take routine defensive plays and convert them into multiple attacker situations. Routine digs where balls went right to the defenders, we put those balls in the setters’ hands and got in our transition game. Our defensive pursuit and ball handling got much better as well.”

South Carolina began spring practice March 13 and competed in two tournaments prior to Saturday’s invitational. Coach Somera’s Gamecocks underwent a less hectic spring practice when compared to 2005, as Somera was hired at the end of February.

“One of the things in taking over a program that many people may overlook is while there are different classes of players in terms of sophomores, juniors, etc., they are all really freshmen and have new responsibilities when a new coach is hired,” Somera said. “And a year after the fact, the system is understood and is being executed more consistently. It’s hard for a player to be consistent when she is learning new responsibilities because she learns by mistakes.

“It was nice this weekend to see how much better our execution is. It leads to better team play and flow. And, the competition helped us identify some things we need to hit hard in August. Overall, it was as good a spring as we could have hoped for.”

The Gamecocks will begin practice for the fall Aug. 8. The 2006 schedule is in the final stages of approval, but an exact date for its release is still unknown.