Colorado State University Athletics
Spring update: Blog post from Cassidy Denny
4/6/2015 12:00:00 AM | Volleyball
Hello everyone! This is Cassidy Denny, and I just wanted to write a little something and update you all about what we've been doing for the past couple months during our offseason! We work out Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 6:30 a.m.!! Bright and early, but this is the part of the spring season that builds our muscles and helps up become stronger, faster and more agile. On top of this, we also run sprints twice a week while our strength coach times us. If we don't make time, it doesn't count! This offseason, the entire team has worked so hard in both the weight room and the gym, and we've seen immediate improvements. We hardly ever miss our times anymore.
For the first month back, the team was in what we call "individuals," which means that we are grouped together by position and spend two hours per week together getting better at specific skills. For the liberos, we worked on serve-receive and on getting balls tipped right over the block. The middles spent a lot of time on blocking. These small-group practices help us focus on the individual skills that we need to get better at, and when we start full team practices we can all see the progress from these sessions almost immediately!
After the month of individual work, full team practices started up! Lasting for about two hours, we start the first hour by working on individual skills, and then come together for the last hour and do a lot of drills and playing. These practices are very action-packed, competitive and a ton of fun!! After two weeks of team practice, we had our first spring tournament in Colby, Kan., on March 28. While there, we participated in drills with and scrimmaged against the Denver, Kansas and Wichita State volleyball teams. This was our first time playing another team besides each other since the Sweet 16 match against Texas. It was a lot of fun to get back on the court again, and we played a lot of different lineups to see what worked best. We saw a lot of good things happen during these scrimmages, but we also saw some areas that we can still continue to improve upon. After all, this is a new team!
Then, on April 2, we traveled to Boulder to scrimmage CU in a four-set match. We tried a different lineup than before, and ran a 6-2 offense for the first time. For those of you who may not know what a 6-2 is, it allows us to use two setters. Alex Reid can play all six rotations, so that allows Dri (Culbert) to play front row and set, along with Crystal (Young) or Grace (Gordon). This lineup seemed to work well, and we played CU extremely competitively. We split the games 2-2 (20-25, 21-25, 25-17, 25-15), but of course if we had played a fifth set we would have had a repeat of the NCAA tournament!!
This week, we will continue to improve every day, and prepare to scrimmage DU again this Saturday in Denver. Offseason is challenging, but seeing the progress we have made as a team only makes us look forward to this upcoming season even more!! Thanks for reading and your continued support. Go Rams!
