In just a few hours, the girls volleyball team will be facing No. 3 nationally-ranked Hamilton Southeastern at home. 

Senior midblocker Ava Mardis says that this game has been a big goal for the entire team from the start.

“We have set this game as a goal since the beginning of this season, and we’ve just kind of been working toward it and working on specific plays and different things that we know that will help us for that game,” Mardis said. “So it’s kind of been a goal for the whole season.”

Preparing for such a highly-ranked team is a hard task, especially considering the depth of talent of the HSE roster, including a Division I talent in outside hitter Lauren Harden

“We’ve been working on serving more aggressively and working on closing our outside blocks,” senior libero Sheridan Young said. “Their outside hitter is going to Florida, and she is top in the state right now.” 

Not only is HSE among the highly-rated programs in the nation, they are also the defending 4A state champions, defeating Yorktown in four sets to claim the school’s first volleyball state championship.

“They won State last year, and they only graduated one senior,” Young said. “She didn’t contribute a whole lot last year, so they haven’t lost a whole lot of people. They’re coming into the season feeling really strong and have a lot of stuff from each position.”

For Mardis, the key to this match is to keep a cool head and not let the heat of the match throw the team off guard. 

“We know that they’re always solid,” Mardis said. “Going into this match, we know that we have to know that errors are going to happen, and we can’t let them take advantage of us. We just need to stay together as a team the whole entire match.”

While in the past this may have been hard, the new season has brought more camaraderie to the team, which has made this more feasible than before. 

“I feel prepared more this year than last year because I trust the team more,” junior outside hitter Ellen Zapp said.

In matchups like this, focusing on the number by an opponent’s name could trip up a team, but the team understands that to succeed, they need to ignore the statistics and focus on the game.

“At the beginning of the season, we were not even ranked,” Young said. “Now, we’re showing everybody that we actually can stay with the teams.