Florida Volleyball Hosts Weekly Media Opportunity
Friday, September 19, 2008 | Volleyball
Florida Head Coach Mary Wise
“Our philosophy has always been that if we can win an SEC Championship – and you can only do that by playing well over the course of 2 ? months - then the postseason will take care of itself. To win the league now in a double round-robin with as many great players as there are in the league with 25-point sets, I just don't think any team is going to go through the league unscathed.”
What Florida will learn from its weekend matches...
“What we will know is where we are at this point a week after playing these two teams,” Wise said. “Georgia has a great All-American type player in Maria Taylor and LSU has at least three players for All-American consideration. We have our work cut out for us this weekend.”
On whether Florida will use its loss as ammunition to win its matches this weekend...
“It's not so much ammunition as it is what we can learn from a loss. Over the years, we understand that we learn much more after losing than we do from winning. From that, we learn in terms of how good Colorado State was and how they were able to side out so consistently against us. It took a team like Colorado State that is that good, playing that well for us to see those weaknesses and places that we can get better.”
On how the team responded to its loss at No. 21 Colorado State...
“I think it's more what we saw come Tuesday when the team was back in the gym practicing. The team was focused and I thought that we had a really good week of practice. It's a learning process. The season is not about one match, so we did not put any more emphasis on that loss than we did in the win over Long Beach. It's all about getting better.”
On what to expect from the SEC this season...
“As we said a year ago, this is not your mother's SEC. It's a very different looking league. There are so many good coaches and there isn't a team in this league without a great player. Volleyball is like basketball – one great player can really change a team and it's not like football where you need so many bodies. If you get more than one great player, then you're really good and that's what LSU is.”
On if there's pressure to win the team's 18th consecutive SEC title…
“If there's pressure it would only be in pressure that we would put on ourselves because every year we know it's all starting today at 0-0. We've got players that were toddlers in diapers when we started here, so it would be unfair to them to ask them to do anything more than they're capable of. The recipe for this hasn't changed and that is that we work really hard on our match preparation, we work hard a week leading up to it and play our best, hoping that our best is good enough.”
On Florida's 6-2 offense...
“It's still a work in progress, but I think that the future of it is really bright. We think it's going to pay dividends down the road.”
On redshirt freshman Kristy Jaeckel...
“I don't know if there's a more stronger, physical freshman in the country. She's not a true freshman - she benefited from being in school for a year and training with our strength coach Matt DeLancey. You add her physical skills with the competitor that she is and it's a pretty good combination. It's pretty exciting that she's just a freshman.”
On what freshman Colleen Ward brings to the team...
“When we recruited Colleen, what we knew is that we had someone with the perfect physical build for a volleyball player - her length, her long arms, but she also has the temperament of a really hard worker. If anything, we will have to teach Colleen when to back off. She reminds me of Jenny Manz, who worked so hard and played so hard. Colleen is going to be able to score points for us in the front row and in the back row.”
#6 Kristy Jaeckel, OH/RS
On what the team has worked on this week in preparation for Georgia...
“We're really trying to just work on what we can get better at and improve our weaknesses all the time – anything we can do to score more points on our side of the net.”
On facing former high school and club teammate Ann Dylla...
“She's a great person. She has always been really sweet and nice and hard-working, so I think that it will be really fun playing against her since I've been playing with her for so long. We've definitely kept in touch and our families are really close. I've known them since I moved to Colorado.”
On what it's like to play against someone that you know...
“It's fun. You try not to focus too much on it and stay focused on what you need to do, but it's always fun to see people that I know from home out here.”
On what the team gained from its loss to No. 21 Colorado State...
“We learned a lot from it and there's definitely a lot that we can get better at. I think we know that we can come out and be a way better team than we were. I think it motivates us more.”
On the trip to her home state of Colorado last week...
“It was nice to be able to see my parents and my brother and my sister, and be able to get to spend some time with them.”
#7 Elyse Cusack, L
On the 17 SEC Championship banners hanging in the Lemerand Center...
“We walk in the gym every day and we see that – we call it our championship corner. Every day in practice, we see the history of the program and the tradition. That's something that we're definitely excited about and want to keep improving on.”
On the strength of the SEC...
“Every year, the SEC is just getting so much better. We have Georgia and LSU this weekend and they're both great teams. We're such a young team this year and they're not quite used to the SEC and what the other teams are going to bring. We aren't going to be able to take a day off like you may have been able to do back in the day. Every day, every match is pretty important for us.”
On what to expect from SEC matches this season...
“You can't take any match for granted. You're going to get every team's best shot and we need to prepare for each team equally.”
On the team's non-conference schedule this season...
“It was a good non-conference schedule this year. Definitely playing at Colorado State was a hostile environment with 4,000 fans. Unfortunately, we lost that match, but it's only going to make us better and we've identified some of our weaknesses because of that.”
