Oct. 1, 2007

FAIRFAX, Va. - The first wave of academic tests made these last two weeks busy to say the least. But as sleep deprived as we were, we pushed through as we played our first three conference matches.

For our regular season opener we traveled to Harrisonburg to take on JMU. Unfortunately, this was a rather crushing defeat. I say that only because we dropped three set points in game four to lose the match. It is completely devastating to lose a run of points at that stage of the game. But even with that one poorly timed hiccup, I was extremely proud of how we played. JMU is a very strong team with some of the conference's best players, which made for a very competitive game with sometimes ridiculously long rallies and very tight sets. Even though we lost, it was a really fun game to play and I am looking forward to playing them again at our place!

After a hard week of practice and many tests, we were ready to play our last two matches in the P.E. Building. The Friday night Game of the Week against University of Delaware saw a huge crowd turnout which was amazing and much appreciated. With the crowd behind us we were able to pull out the first set 34-32. In the second set we played them tight but fell just short. But in the third and fourth set, the `wheels kinda fell off the bus,' as PK(Coach) would say. Something happened and all of a sudden we couldn't capitalize on many of our scoring opportunities. Giving credit where it's due, Delaware had tenacious defense coupled with a very strong offense and took advantage our inconsistencies.

After a little video however, I think we pulled some really valuable lessons from this match which we applied the next night against Towson. In my four years at Mason, we have never beat Towson in the regular season; Paul Koncir (head coach of Towson) used to be on our coaching staff; and it was our last match to ever be played in the P.E. Building; as you can imagine we were a little pumped for the game. And it showed as we beat them in three games, reporting an unbelievable 26 blocks!!!!

The next day it was finally time to perform our skit for the student-athlete picnic and defend our title. After some slight technical difficulty we were proud to finish in the top three and satisfied to lose to the hilarious skit put on by the wrestlers (I recommend you check it out at Mason Madness!).