In a prior post I talked about the luck of the Exeter men’s team I coached getting a walk-over (a forfeit) in the BUCS round of 16 match during the 2013-14 season. That gave us easy passage on through to Final 8s. We had a bit of a reversal of fortunes shortly thereafter.
Both the men’s and women’s second teams played Conference Cup quarterfinal matches. The draw actually worked out such that the same university was the opposition, and the host, for both matches. For the guys we fielded a nearly full-strength team. We lacked a libero, which did hurt, but otherwise we had a full complement. It was an ugly match – especially since the refs made no ball-handling calls at all. We had a bad start, but with a few on the fly adjustments we were able to claw back from 0-2 down to win. That saw the guys on to the semifinals two weeks later, where we hosted.
The tough luck came on the women’s side. Because of exams, only two of our regular players were available. There was also a young lady who started training with us just the week prior. We had to bring in three players from the club’s Intermediates group. One of them did some fill-in duty the prior term for South West league play when we were thin. The other two were completely new to the group, though. They were literally asked to fill out the team the night before!
Needless to say, you don’t go into a match in a situation like that with very high expectations – particularly against a team that had been playing together all season long, on their home court, and after they had won their first round match 3-0. On top of that, we had no middles!
So what to do?
I ended up putting the two regular BUCS players and the one who started training with us last week in a triangle to balance out the skill and experience. I put our tall BUCS outside hitter opposite the setter and had them both operate out of the middle when front row. The OH played 6 when back row, but the setter played her normal 1 position. The rest of the players just filled in around the other two.
That’s about the best I could do having never seen half the team play before. Whether it was the system or the players or what, we ended up doing surprisingly well. I’d expected a quick 0-3, and I got the impression the ladies were kind of expecting that as well. Instead it was a tight affair throughout. I think we never scored less than 21 and we actually won the 3rd set! Under the circumstances, a 3-1 loss of that nature was practically a victory.
The guy who reffed (one of the men who played in the match against our guys) made me laugh. He complimented the team on being really well coached. Hah! 🙂
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