Fall 2013 Overview:
Going into the Fall 2013 season, the team knew that eight spots needed to be filled. We had two sophomores, three juniors, and three seniors. We ended up taking seven freshmen onto our brand new team. For preseason, we only have a week to prepare for our first weekend. Coach loves throwing us into the hardest, but we are tough enough to handle it, or so we thought. We came out of weekend one with a 3-1 record, after losing to the #5 team in the nation, Christopher Newport.
We had some maturing to do and moves to make. We managed to do something incredible in one week. We came out of week two with a 5-3 record, taking all four games having played against strong teams. Concluding our next two weekends, our record was 12-5. After having lost to #2 Salisbury and one of our personal rivals, NYU, in five sets, NPVB was not taking no for an answer anymore.
That’s just what we did. We went on a 20 game winning streak. Throughout that streak we beat #23 Williams College and all nine teams in the SUNYAC conference. We were most proud of our feat in conference. To go 9-0 in conference was not easy, but our perseverance to win outweighed our feelings to let up on other teams.
We finally faced our first loss in almost two months to Buffalo State University in SUNYAC finals on our home court. We were extremely disappointed in ourselves after a tough loss. We still had the chance for a bid to NCAA Regionals with our 32-6 record. At about 11:30 the day after SUNYACS, tears were shed when we received the news to come to practice at 3:15 because we would be leaving for NCAA Division III Volleyball Regionals on Thursday.
In 2012, we also got a bid to go to the tournament but only eight of us had gone. We had seven new girls to experience the excitement with. Once we arrived, we swept Colby-Sawyer College in the first round and Richard Stockton College in the second round, just to face #22 Clarkson University for the second time in two years in the finals. We had a vengeance to fulfill with this match, but we couldn’t out perform Clarkson.
We ended our season with a very successful 34-7, better than 2012. Having such a young team, we were satisfied for the time being but we know we have to prepare to better ourselves for next season.
