Stefanie Larson's Volleyball Student-Athlete Blog #8

Sorry I missed last week. Our school was on fall break and the blog sort of slipped my mind.

Over break the WU volleyball team ventured to Cleveland, Ohio, for some site-seeing, shopping and of course, volleyball. We got to Cleveland late Wednesday night, then went to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame on Thursday. Afterwards we went shopping, out for a nice dinner, then back to our hotel. Friday morning we were up pretty early to make our drive to Tiffin, Ohio, where we had a light practice at Heidelberg University before our game against Carthage College later that night.

We didn’t play that great against Carthage. We came out pretty strong at first, but the match was soon over in three, starting our weekend off with a loss.

I know many of us didn’t go into the tournament with much confidence, and the loss right off the bat didn’t help. We headed back to our Tiffin hotel that night frustrated and discouraged. But after a short night sleep we were up bright and early to head back to the University to face two more seriously tough opponents, Heidelberg and Wittenberg.

We had watched the two teams face-off the night before. Both were absolutely amazing, but Heidelberg came back to beat Wittenberg in five. We played Heidelberg first, and took one off of them right away. But in true Webster fashion we lost our consistency in the second game. The third game was close and so was the fourth, but we couldn’t pull out the win. We didn’t have much time to think about what had happened because we played Wittenberg right after Heidelberg.

Wittenberg is ranked somewhere in the top ten in the nation for DIII volleyball, and I’m so proud to say that little old Webster gave them a run for their money. We took Wittenberg to five games, and in the fifth game we were tied 8-8. It might’ve been the most intense game of volleyball I’ve played in my life.

We ended up dropping the game to them but so many good things came from this weekend. We gained confidence that wasn’t there before, and for the first time in a long time we truly played like a team.

Catch ya later alligator,
Stefanie M. Larson
(about Stefanie)