Coming off its best performance of the season, the Terrapin volleyball team is looking to ride its momentum into a weekend of tough matchups.
The team is fresh off a five-set victory against Virginia Tech and has been feeling energized and rejuvenated at practice all week.
“Winning cures a lot of ails,” coach Tim Horsmon said. “I think they’ve enjoyed coming to practice a little more. … They’ve had a little different bounce in their step. We need to enjoy that and have a good weekend and carry that momentum with us.”
The Terps (11-13, 3-8 ACC) will undoubtedly need some of that newfound energy when they travel to Winston-Salem, N.C., to face Wake Forest (7-15, 5-6) tonight, and then head about 80 miles east to face Duke (19-4, 9-2) on Saturday.
The team last faced the Blue Devils and Demon Deacons on Sept. 25 and 26. In those two matches, Duke and Wake Forest recorded 104 kills combined, en route to hitting percentages of .260 and .363, respectively. The dismal showing on defense was a main reason why the Terps finished the weekend without a victory.
After the Wake Forest match, assistant coach Tami Ores said, “We are going to be setting drills up that are very defensive minded this week. … This week we’re going to get back to basics.”
Horsmon reiterated that sentiment this week.
“We’ve continued to work on the fundamentals,” Horsmon said. “Hopefully we’re getting better as the season goes on and those numbers will go down.”
And for the Terps to have a shot this weekend, their defensive play will need to be better than what it was the last time around. They will also need outside hitter Maddi Lee to continue playing the way she did against Virginia Tech.
Lee recorded 14 kills against the Hokies, with four straight to start the decisive fifth set. The Terps ended up winning that set 15-13, largely because of Lee’s impressive performance.
But perhaps the most important thing to come out of the Virginia Tech match was the end of the team’s five-game losing streak and slump of 16 straight dropped sets. The win gave the Terps reason to believe they can compete with some of the ACC’s best.
“We got to beat a pretty good team at home,” Horsmon said. “For us, it was just that our kids believe that we can beat teams other than a couple of the teams we’ve beaten the last couple years. … It showed them that we can do it, and they probably needed to see that.”
engelke@umdbk.com
