The Flyers concluded a GREAT undefeated A10 season with a four set win over Xavier last Saturday. Kelly said before the Xavier match:

“We know we are going into the lion’s den on Saturday. The last three regular season matches we’ve played down there have all gone 5”.

The team has played really well for the past two weeks beating Cincinati and winning three A10 matches. When I asked Kelly if anyone in particular had stood out during this time he responded:

“We’ve put together a couple of weeks of pretty good volleyball. We’ve sided out pretty well and hitting for a pretty high percentage. It hasn’t just been one or two people that are playing well. They’ve all had their moments and matches where they’ve been pretty good. You never know who is going to go off and have a big match. Everyone is capable of it and Sam has the confidence in all of her hitters to ride them”.

I believe that the team has improved in all aspects of the game since the beginning of the season. Blocking stood out to me as an area which has shown a very significant improvement. Kelly wasn’t in complete agreement when I asked what skill had improved the most:

“We’ve gotten a lot better at out-of-system attacking. Kray and Alaina have gotten a lot better in this area and the rest of the team is putting them in good situations to get good swings”.

At this point of the season you always hope that your team is peaking rather than already playing it’s best vball. When I asked Kelly if the team was peaking at the right time he made a great point:

“I don’t know. We hope to still have another month of matches to play. So it’s not so much trying to peak as it is just trying to get better every day”.

Let’s hope the Flyers are still playing in four weeks!

In the A10 tournament the Flyers will play the winner of the Duquesne/Temple match. If they make it to the finals they would play the winner of Xavier/VCU/Butler

I also asked Kelly about the seeding process for Volleyball and here is his response which would make you believe the Flyers have no chance of hosting:

“In volleyball, only 16 teams get seeded. Usually those seeds come from teams in the Top 18 or 20 in the RPI. If you get seeded, you automatically get to host the 1st and 2nd rounds. This rule was put into effect last year. There’s a great power-point on the AVCA web-site http://avca.org/divisions/division-one-women/more-information/ that discusses what the committee uses in making their decisions”.

Good luck to the Flyers this weekend!