By Daniel Johnson, Sports Editor
Despite dropping to second in the LSC South after losing to West Texas A&M, head volleyball coach Kellen Mock is optimistic about her teams ability to recharge their season at the LSC Crossover Tournament.
“We’ve worked all week to be more aggressive and fix our past mistakes to try and make lemonade out of the lemon West Texas handed us,” Mock said.
Although ACU is currently second in the LSC and has defeated all but one of its conference and regional opponents, the team is still unranked in the Southwest Regional Poll.
“We need to start off on fire,” middle blocker Krystine Cethoute said. “We are playing teams in our region, so hopefully winning will get us into the regional rankings.”
ACU will take on three regional opponents from the LSC North at the tournament, including Midwestern State and Southwestern Oklahoma State on Friday and Texas Woman’s on Saturday.
The trip to Kingsville will be their first of two road trips to the city. All three of the teams the Wildcats’ are playing having losing records and ACU is 9-0 against their tournamnet opponents and 23-1 in the tournament overall. No matter what their opponent’s records are or how well ACU has done in the past, Mock is not anticipating a walk in the park.
“The South teams have been stronger in the past, but that’s not the case anymore,” Mock said. “The North division teams have done a good job recruiting and they have higher quality, well-rounded players.”
For Cethoute, playing struggling teams this weekend is a good opportunity to build on the team weaknesses of the first half of the season.
“This weekend we can practice things to get ready for the better caliber teams we will faced in the second half of the season,” she said.
The Wildcats went 4-1 in the first half of conference and finished with a 10-8 overall record. ACU is second in conference in assists with 931 and third in kills at 987. Individually, Outside hitter Abbie Lowry leads the team with 296 kills and is third in the LSC for total kills, while junior libero Liz Snoddy is 10th in the league in digs-per-game at 3.83.
After this weekend the Wildcats will be on the road for three more matches before returning home for their second conference match against Angelo State on Oct. 19.match against Angelo State on Oct. 19.
