The Alabama volleyball team, who won its first Southeastern Conference game last weekend, will be on the road this weekend against Kentucky and Tennessee. The Tide, after sweeping South Carolina (25-19, 25-18, 25-16), is continuing to practice hard and is looking forward to continuing to win.
“I think consistency is the biggest thing for us,” said head coach Judy Green. “This past weekend when we played Florida and South Carolina at home, we felt like, as coaching staff, this was by far the most consistent performance for a whole weekend. We want to continue that, but we also want to get better on our execution of what we are doing, whether that’s defensively or offensively. We want to continue to focus on growing ourselves as a team and not putting too much emphasis on the other teams.”
Lately the Tide has come up short with road games, losing five out of the nine away games thus far, though the team is looking to change that statistic.
“I think our confidence is up and we know we can win,” sophomore Kayla Fitterer said. “So, I think that will help us get through it.”
The win against South Carolina stopped a six-game losing streak for the Tide. It was also Alabama’s first win against an SEC team.
“We are definitely moving in the right direction right now,” junior Stephanie Riley said. “We’ve been talking about making this the greatest turnaround in Alabama volleyball history because we didn’t start so great, but now that we’ve got a win under our belt and we’re playing together better as a team, I think we can definitely make the turnaround and make the season worth it.”
The players are starting to understand and learn from each other as they progress.
“We’re doing really good, especially now that we won [against] South Carolina,” Fitterer said. “It was a confidence booster. We’re all meshing and I think we’re doing really good.”
The win seems to have given Green and the team the focus they needed to go on the road to other SEC teams and add some more wins to their 9-8 season.
“The most important thing is that they think they can win,” Green said. “The coaches have always thought this team was very capable of doing something very special. I think getting the taste of victory certainly helps your confidence because it lets you know that what you’re doing in practice is paying off on gameday. I think they feel good about what they did. I think the next test for us is to be able to go on the road and do that.”
A Kentucky native, Riley is looking forward to going home to play this weekend.
“I always love playing in Kentucky,” Riley said. “I actually have a couple of high school friends on the team, so it’s fun to play against them, but it’s a team that I always have a strong grudge towards. I’ll have a lot of people there, so it’s a fun place to play, for me.”
The Tide will be playing in Kentucky at 6 p.m. on Friday and Tennessee at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday.
