Esteban Cortez / The Collegian
The Fresno State volleyball team is starting off the season a little differently than seasons past. In 2011, the Bulldogs begin the season playing some of the toughest teams on their schedule.
The Bulldogs open up hosting the Fresno State Classic and will face formidable opponents such as No. 20 San Diego, Cal Poly and Long Island.
For the 2010 season, Cal Poly was 22-7, but didn’t get selected for the NCAA Tournament. San Diego had a successful 2010 season advancing to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, eventually losing to Southern California. The Toreros finished the season with a 24-5 record. Long Island finished its season going 10-21 and lost in the North East Conference Tournament.
Although the season is going to start with some tough competition, head coach Lauren Netherby-Sewell sees it as a thrilling opportunity rather than a road block.
“It’s an exciting time,” said Netherby-Sewell at volleyball media day. “I love this time of the year. We’re testing things out daily and we’re seeing what we got. It’s always nerve wrecking right before your first matches playing against some of the better teams that we’ll face this year. We like where we’re at right now. We like this team and we’re on a roll.”
Netherby-Sewell says the team’s goal for the season is to get to the NCAA Tournament, but the real challenge is getting some of the players used to the Bulldog way. Fresno State lost four seniors from last season to graduation and have seven new players to try to fill the vacant slots.
Some of the notable newcomers are freshman Maci Murdock, freshman Christina Lee and junior college transfer Barbara Alcantara.
Murdock is a middle blocker who had 357 kills, 264 blocks and 171 digs. Lee was a two-time first-team All-WCAL honoree at the libero position during her high school career. Alcantara was a 2010 junior college second-team All-American. Netherby-Sewell talked a little bit about her newcomers.
“We have seven newcomers,” said Netherby-Sewell, who is entering her fourth season. “It’s interesting, everyone’s telling me ‘you’ve built the program now are you where you want to be.’ I said well we’re teaching again because we have seven new people coming in, but we like who we have in.
We really spend a lot of time recruiting them and they’re very talented. We probably have four of our seven starting this weekend, which is a lot. Again, they have the talent. They just need to learn the system and get comfortable with it.”
Despite so many new faces, the ‘Dogs have some returning standouts in Brianna Clarke and junior Marissa Brand, both 2010 second team All-Western Athletic Conference honorees. Clarke was honored as a preseason All-WAC selection for the second straight season.
Netherby-Sewell gave some thoughts on both players and how one of them didn’t get properly recognized.
“Bri’s an obvious choice,” Netherby-Sewell said. “She puts up good numbers every year. We hope she has her best numbers this year. Marissa Brand got slighted in that vote and I can’t wait for her to disappoint our opponents by being pretty awesome. So there are going to be some other nods I think at the end of the season, but Bri is well deserved.”
Brand led the team with 354 kills and was second on the team with 268 digs.
Now, with the games a couple days away, Netherby-Sewell described what it will take for her team to be successful.
“Our serving is going to be really important,” Netherby-Sewell said. “We’ve worked on it for months. Everyone thinks serving is serving and they don’t practice it a lot. We practice it all the time. You just saw it at the end of our practice here. We want to serve tough to debilitate our opponents’ sideout game. That’s where they’re going to be strong. If we can debilitate that a little bit and play our game on the outside then we have a good chance.”