Indiana University Athletics
Recapping The Purdue Spring Tournament
4/16/2007 12:00:00 AM | Women's Volleyball
April 16, 2007
Indiana head coach Sherry Dunbar sat down with IUHOOSIERS.com to discuss how the team fared at its second event of the spring, the Purdue Spring Tournament, on April 7.
General thoughts on the Purdue tournament:
"We had three goals pretty much going into the tournament as a team. One was serving consistency and aggressiveness, another was to work on our communication skills and the last goal was to increase our defensive mentality on the court. I thought our serving was a lot better than it was in Louisville and it's something we really focused on. I think that can be a huge strength for this team, we've got a lot of them jump floating and doing a lot of different type of things than they've done before. We want to use it more as offense, and I think we can do that with what they've started to show lately, so we're really excited about that. Our communication definitely could have been better. That's something that this team needs to work on and practice, and they don't realize that communication is something that you have to practice all the time. Especially in a team sport like this, and its just something that has to become a part of them. The fact that communication is not just cheering communication but information communication and that's what we're trying to get through to them. I think they've always thought of communication as just being supportive of each other, instead of using it for what we want them to use it for. So, we are still working on that part of it. The third part is the one that is really glaring to us, stood out to us in the tournament and its something that we really need to focus on in practice. Our defense is probably the worst part of our game right now. It's something we've been working on a lot in practice but more in controlled situations, so what we are trying to do now is add more live hitters in practice and make it a little more unpredictable than predictable, like it has been. I think that is definitely going to help, but its something that has really stood out to us this spring and something that my teams have always been very good at. We've had players that have had that kind of defensive mentality and this team doesn't; they want to get there but there's definitely a lot of room to grow in that area and they understand that and they are willing to put in the work and so we are just really challenging them in practice to pick up that part of the game. That was our last goal and I didn't think we did a good job at all in the tournament at that. Watching the other teams in picking up balls, they were just able to run so much more offense even if they were out of system and for us, play was dead when it came on our side, so that was just something that really stood out to me.
On who stood out at Purdue:
"As far as people, I thought Juli (Pierce) had another good tournament. I think she's really stepped up and she's kind of a silent competitor. She's not really vocal on the court and stuff, but she definitely has a competitive streak in her and I like to see that out of her. I thought Gabby (Allison) had a really good tournament in just stepping up from the two weeks prior to that. I thought that she blocked well, our blocking was way better, and she was a big part of that. Just providing some offense, I thought Allison (Regas) tried to get the middles the ball way more than she did in the Louisville tournament and that helped just to take some pressure off of Erica (Short) and Lauren (Ditteon) and just got more of a middle attack established. I think that forced the middles to get more involved in the things they were doing and I thought that was really good. Overall, it was good in the fact that it's showing us a lot of the things we need to work on and I think there are some things that we're making positive strides in. We have two more weekends left and hopefully after another week of just total defense that we've been doing maybe we'll see some strides in that. I mean that's what we're trying to see all along is just been making progress."
On what the team will work on in practice:
"We are really focusing on serving and passing. If you came to our practice you would see that we rarely work on offense. Offense to me is just not that important, that will come and it's something that we will work on in the fall a little bit more. I want to be a good ball control team and I think with serving that's something that we have to focus on because of the jump floaters and stuff. It's such an individual thing, serving is, and they have to feel comfortable and everybody's going to do it a little bit different and they have to feel comfortable with themselves to go back. We're putting a lot of pressure on them in practice to do different things that way. At the end of practice we pick someone different everyday, and they have to get three in a row or the team is running. We're just putting them in certain situations everyday in practice to do that so we're still making that a big focus. If we can't pass, than we can't run a diversified offense, and so that's going to really struggle for us so we really focus on passing and then the defense."
