 Hello and welcome back into the coaches' corner. I'm joined now with Dave Trumbo, women's volleyball head coach. And coach, you opened up last week with McDaniel at home and beat them 3-0. You talk a little bit about that game. McDaniel's an always a big one for us because their rivals, not conference rivals, but their big rivals from right up the street. And they've done a great job bringing their program back and to be able to beat them on our home floor with just a phenomenal crowd. It was fun. And the first set was really close, a two-point victory. But after that, we settled down a little bit and played a little bit better and did a good job. And talking about close matches, this weekend you go out and play some really quality teams that are going to be your gear up for conference play that starts next Saturday, this Saturday, right? And you played them pretty close into some deep matches. Can you talk a little bit about how the weekend went? We knew that we were going to have great competition. The first match against Carnegie Mellon, the last two years, we've gone five with Carnegie Mellon. They are much improved over the last two years, ranked number 14 in the country, and had them two to one. And we're feeling pretty good. And if we're not able to come up with victories in set four and five, then we played Ithaca, who had come in and beat Carnegie Mellon at 2 o'clock. So Ithaca was pretty good. We split the first two with them and just were not able to close out that match. That was tough. We lost two. Then we come in. We're fired up for Salisbury the next day. Well, Salisbury is a little bit more fired up than we were. And probably Salisbury was playing his best volleyball of the year and won the first set and were not able to play very well. Probably that was the most disappointing thing of the weekend. We just did not play very well. As a team, it wasn't any one particular thing we needed to work on. I have to give the girls a lot of credit. They had a players only meeting. They regrouped and just played really great volleyball against Ohio Northern. It went five, of course, and unfortunately with us, 16-14. So now we're asking how are we going to come out of this? Our seniors have never experienced four losses like this. We've never experienced competition like this all in one weekend. The goal always being to improve the team, to learn more about ourselves. So as we move forward now into conference play, play Marymount on Wednesday, when we followed that with a conference try match against Hood and Lycoming on Saturday, and then follow that with Albright on Tuesday. So we've got three big conference matches coming up. In the end, what we want to do is get first place in our conference and hopefully host the conference championship. So all of this will work together in the end. It's just a little bit hard to take right now. And the girls know it was great competition. We really enjoyed moments. We showed moments of brilliance. Victoria Pro Kick, our freshman and middle guy, conference, our all-conference. So that's a real positive. And we had some other really just, we played with just such hard. It's just disappointing we didn't come up with any victories. Right. What are the things that you'll learn from this weekend as you move into conference play? Well, I think how hard you have to play every point. I mean, the other teams, defense, were just as scrappy as we were. And we just would have incredible good swings. And they'd come up with a ball and send it back. And how hard you have to play point after point, how you have to serve, we call it serve aggressively because we don't want them to pass us very easily. The top teams can all pass and serve very well. And that kind of was proven this weekend. We had our lapses, but for the most part, we passed pretty good. And that's why the matches were pretty close. Right. And so now moving into conference play, are those the learning points that you need to really emphasize on going into conference play? I think that you keeping our team chemistry intact, the confidence that we play with is very important after you lose after you have a weekend like this. And I really do believe we have very good senior leadership. And we'll have two practice before we play Marymount and we'll be just fine. And hopefully this week continues that success that you've been having this season. Oh, that's where we're going. That's where we're going, Joe. We've got the next ranked team we play is Eastern on October 1st, and it's at home. And so that's a big advantage for us. And Eastern, if things go the way Eastern's playing, they're going to be in the top 10 by then because they swept everybody. Not didn't sweep, they lost in sets, but they were able to win all four matches. Right. Thank you, coach, for your time this week. And we'll see you out on Wednesday with Marymount at home. I hope I'm smiling a little bit more than I am right now. I appreciate it, coach. He's Dave Trombo. I'm Joe Wamba, and this has been the Coach's Corner.