By: By Joseph Feldman
As the Kennesaw State volleyball team works through its spring schedule, head coach Keith Schunzel sat down with KSUOwls.com to talk about how the team has been doing.
After winning a share of the ASUN Regular Season Championship, how well has the team turned the page this spring and looked to next season?
Our team was certainly excited about what we accomplished last year, but to be honest, anytime you finish the season like we did, where we fell just short of our ultimate goal of the NCAA tournament, there's a bitter taste in your mouth that I think continues to be there for everyone. Our players have worked really hard this spring, we continue to train well and improve, but our team still has a lot of things to prove and a ton of upside that we're striving for. Even though we have an experienced group now, we're still getting better and pushing the envelope of what we can do, which is fun to be a part of.
What's your biggest focus for the team while training in the spring?
We're moving a couple players around from a position standpoint, so that's definitely been a focus this spring to get them comfortable, learning and improving. And then one of our main areas of focus is always to keep our identity of great effort and communication that we've done a good job building while constantly finding ways to improve our skills.
You've scrimmaged some local teams. How have those matches gone?
We have played three spring dates so far and we have been playing quite well. This past Saturday we won an eight-team tournament up at Chattanooga, where we went undefeated. We beat Lee, Georgia Tech, Tennessee Tech and Georgia State, all 2-0.
We also played Georgia State in their gym a couple weeks ago and beat them 4 out of 5 sets playing a different lineup each set, so that's always encouraging. Two weeks ago, we played a fun match against a team of very talented former collegiate players who live in the Atlanta area and still playing in the adult volleyball scene, and we beat them all 4 sets, again playing a bunch of different lineups.
Every spring you guys do a cool team activity. What did you do this spring and why do you think it's important to do things like that away from the court?
This spring our annual camping trip unfortunately got stormed out, but we did spend this past Saturday evening after the UT-Chat tourney at Leadership Coach
Jason Flowers' house. He has some land on his property and we made a big bonfire in his backyard, cooked a bunch of food on the fire and hung out together outside. We sit around and laugh, tell stories and make fun of each other. We're so lucky to have people in our athletic department like Coach Flowers who are willing to open up their house to us and spend a Saturday night with our team. We're also very fortunate to have a team and staff full of people that are comfortable in their own skin and enjoy hanging out together and having some fun off the court too.
What have you been the happiest with this spring in training?
Two things in particular have stood out this spring:
The first one is that we have a rising senior class that are absolutely fantastic leaders by example. They come in and train hard every day, they carry themselves well and take care of their business off the court, they work hard in the classroom and they are still very driven to accomplish more and take this program to another level.
The second thing I'm very happy with is our consistency across the board on our roster. We have never been able to play an entire roster of players while keeping a relatively consistent level of play. A number of teams we have played thus far this spring made the same comment to me after we played, that we were so tough because we were a good, consistent team for the entire match no matter who was in the game. Teams with that level of consistent play give themselves the best chance to win championships.
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