North Carolina State University Athletics
Sweet: Playing in Virginia
10/15/2007 12:00:00 AM | Women's Volleyball
Follow freshman Nikki Sweet's first year with the Wolfpack program each week via the NC State volleyball blog on GoPack.com. Nikki will keep fans up to speed on the latest happenings of the team; discussing practices, training, matches and much more.
RALEIGH, N.C. - This past week was another busy one for Wolfpack volleyball. We had our second weekend of travel this season as we headed up to Virginia to take on the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech.
As far as practice is concerned, we had a good week overall. We worked more on being competitive and improving our mental game in order to play at our potential for a longer amount of time. We had lifting on Monday and Wednesday before practice and conditioning on Tuesday, so it was imperative for us to dial in even more mentally in order to perform to our best ability. We struggled mentally during Tuesday’s practice, but came out strong Wednesday to finish off our practice week on a good note before hitting the road on Thursday.
Volleyball was not the only thing that we had going on, as we all had a lot of academic matters to tend to. For those of you who didn’t know, we had fall break this Thursday and Friday and a lot of us had midterms or other tests and assignments before the break. Us freshmen were a little overwhelmed at first, but I think we did a good job of managing our time between studying and practice. Most everyone felt pretty good after everything was over, and nobody was too worried about their grades. It was just relieving to know that we didn’t have as much homework or studying to do over our traveling weekend.
Our traveling weekend kicked off Friday against the University of Virginia. The match was a rough match for us overall, as we couldn’t seem to click as a team. Serving runs from the Cavaliers also kept us trailing behind them for most of the match. Despite our efforts to pick each other up and our overall intensity, we dropped the match in a disappointing three games. With our spirits down, we loaded the bus and headed off to our next destination.
Our next match was Saturday night against Virginia Tech. This was a much better match for us mentally and physically. We came out much more relaxed than the previous night, and we were ready to battle for however many games it would take to get a win. The first game we came out on fire. We led most of the game and came out with a win. The second game Virginia Tech stepped things up, and we failed to make the necessary adjustments, leading us to lose. We battled back in the third game, but fell short as Virginia Tech squeaked out a win in the end. The fourth game we fell behind in the beginning and couldn’t catch back up, losing the match in four games.
After the match we headed into the locker room to have our usual meeting. We were happier with our performance than on the previous night, but we still weren’t satisfied. We talked about what steps we could take to bring our game to the next level. We also discussed the time and effort we would need to put forth in order to be able to learn to execute these plays consistently. Not only that, but we recognized that we need to continue to work on our mental game and our ability to battle for long periods of time. We are looking forward to taking what we learned this weekend and applying it to practice this week.
This weekend we are back home again as we compete against Miami on Friday night at 6 p.m. and then Florida State on Saturday night at 6 p.m. Please come out to support us, as we are all looking forward to seeing you there.
RALEIGH, N.C. - This past week was another busy one for Wolfpack volleyball. We had our second weekend of travel this season as we headed up to Virginia to take on the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech.
As far as practice is concerned, we had a good week overall. We worked more on being competitive and improving our mental game in order to play at our potential for a longer amount of time. We had lifting on Monday and Wednesday before practice and conditioning on Tuesday, so it was imperative for us to dial in even more mentally in order to perform to our best ability. We struggled mentally during Tuesday’s practice, but came out strong Wednesday to finish off our practice week on a good note before hitting the road on Thursday.
Volleyball was not the only thing that we had going on, as we all had a lot of academic matters to tend to. For those of you who didn’t know, we had fall break this Thursday and Friday and a lot of us had midterms or other tests and assignments before the break. Us freshmen were a little overwhelmed at first, but I think we did a good job of managing our time between studying and practice. Most everyone felt pretty good after everything was over, and nobody was too worried about their grades. It was just relieving to know that we didn’t have as much homework or studying to do over our traveling weekend.
Our traveling weekend kicked off Friday against the University of Virginia. The match was a rough match for us overall, as we couldn’t seem to click as a team. Serving runs from the Cavaliers also kept us trailing behind them for most of the match. Despite our efforts to pick each other up and our overall intensity, we dropped the match in a disappointing three games. With our spirits down, we loaded the bus and headed off to our next destination.
Our next match was Saturday night against Virginia Tech. This was a much better match for us mentally and physically. We came out much more relaxed than the previous night, and we were ready to battle for however many games it would take to get a win. The first game we came out on fire. We led most of the game and came out with a win. The second game Virginia Tech stepped things up, and we failed to make the necessary adjustments, leading us to lose. We battled back in the third game, but fell short as Virginia Tech squeaked out a win in the end. The fourth game we fell behind in the beginning and couldn’t catch back up, losing the match in four games.
After the match we headed into the locker room to have our usual meeting. We were happier with our performance than on the previous night, but we still weren’t satisfied. We talked about what steps we could take to bring our game to the next level. We also discussed the time and effort we would need to put forth in order to be able to learn to execute these plays consistently. Not only that, but we recognized that we need to continue to work on our mental game and our ability to battle for long periods of time. We are looking forward to taking what we learned this weekend and applying it to practice this week.
This weekend we are back home again as we compete against Miami on Friday night at 6 p.m. and then Florida State on Saturday night at 6 p.m. Please come out to support us, as we are all looking forward to seeing you there.
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