Weekly blog from members of the Samford volleyball team that will chronical their journey from preseason fall camp all the way to the Southern Conference Tournament.
Redshirt junior middle blocker
T.J. Russell talks about the Bulldogs ability to continue to learn as a team.
This week we saw the best and the worst of Samford volleyball, but it was all a learning process. To start off the week, our coaches gave us two days off after a long weekend of playing 18 sets of volleyball at UT Arlington and after having arrived back home at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning.
At Monday's practice we were asked, "What kind of team are we becoming?" It was a great question to be asked coming into conference play and not yet hitting our peak in the process during preseason.
We've decided that throughout this process we are becoming a team that is committed to learning but one with still a long ways to go. The process has taught us that we can learn to be powerful and we can score the ball from different areas of the court. We also noticed that we can efficiently generate points from each position on the front row.
Even though we are still learning the process, we are also learning to become "Powerful Young Women."
During Monday's practice we got after it and practiced hard and then rested our bodies on Tuesday. We practiced Wednesday and Thursday to lead up to our games verse Chattanooga and ETSU. We learned some technical things on Wednesday to cycle back up for "Throw Down Thursday's" practice.
On Friday, we saw how the process can affect the game. During the Chattanooga game, we were engaged and playing volleyball in an intentional way. We learned so much about ourselves. We showed consistency on defense and on offense. We showed a lot of GRIT, INTENTION, TENACITY, and POISE throughout this match.
After finishing the first night of conference play with a huge sweep, we went to our dorms to refuel and get ready for ETSU.
On Saturday, we showed some inconsistencies. We showed our lows as a team and we showed some very high volleyball skills. After a tough fought match against ETSU, we learned that the way we played is not what we are trying to become.
We are still engaging in the process and we will become a more powerful team. We ended up losing in the fifth set to ETSU.
As we close the weekend, we have noticed that we are still becoming the team with the growth mindset.
-TJ Russell #1
