The Warhawk volleyball team has completed another successful regular season, finishing with a 24-10 overall record while playing a tough schedule.
Now, head coach Stacy Boudreau’s team wants to translate the regular season success into a postseason run.
“It’s going to be a matter of executing at the right time,” Boudreau said. “The main thing is making sure our kids are ready to go and get the reps they need to in practice.”
Last year, the ’Hawks won the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament, but then lost in the first round of the national tournament to the University of Chicago. In 2010, the team was
28-8 before falling in the first round of the national tournament.
Despite the recent disappointments in the postseason, Boudreau said the preparation for this year’s WIAC and NCAA tournaments will remain the same. She said the focus will always be on the team’s next game and continuing to improve.
“We’ll work on being aggressive with our serving,” Boudreau said, “and our blocking has improved the last two weeks, so we’ll try to continue to improve that.”
Over the past week, the ’Hawks dominated three conference opponents to clinch a second-place finish in the WIAC. Boudreau was happy with her team’s performance and said the wins helped give the team an advantage in preparation.
“The nice thing about this week is that we took care of things last week, and we have more time to practice and watch more film,” she said.
In those three WIAC contests, against UW-Oshkosh, UW-River Falls and UW-Stout, the ’Hawks dominated, winning all three matches, 3-0.
“I think the team knew that they were really, really big games,” junior Leanna Lillge said. “We knew we had to win all three of them to get the second seed in the [conference] tournament.”
Although Boudreau would not speculate about the ’Hawks’ postseason prospects, Lillge did say she believes in her team’s talent.
“We have played with the top teams in the nation,” Lillge said. “We stuck right with the No. 1 team, Washington University, and a few weeks ago we took a couple sets from the No. 2 team in the nation.”
The Warhawks begin the WIAC tournament on Friday, Nov. 2, at 5 p.m. in Stevens Point.
They will play the winner of UW-Stout and UW-Eau Claire for a chance to play in the WIAC tournament championship.
