The way the volleyball team competed in its annual Blue-White scrimmage Monday night in Carmichael arena left senior Emily McGee impressed.
Not because of a brag-worthy victory or particular moment, but because of the consistent display of talent.
“We’ve done a lot of scrimmaging in practices but I think that tonight shows that they’re a lot of things we’re doing well,” McGee said. “There’s a lot of depth in the talent. Normally (in the Blue-White scrimmage) we might have one side that dominates the other side, but it was just very back and forth with everyone contributing from all the different parts of the depth chart.”
The scores for the three sets were 25-22, 25-23, 25-19, with the blue team claiming the first and third sets while the white team won the second. The closeness of all three sets resonated with the Tar Heel veterans.
“This is probably one of the best blue and white scrimmages we’ve had,” sophomore Chaniel Nelson said. “I feel like we really pushed one another a lot this past season in trying to get the most out of everyone and the level that the freshmen brought in this year in our practices, the level of intensity that’s always brought makes me encouraged to see what more we’ll do this year.”
Admittedly, the preseason All-ACC opposite hitter saw room for improvement in the night’s performances, but nothing that can’t be fixed.
“Little fixes are what we need,” Nelson said. “That’s what our coach is telling us. But we’re all really young and we’re just starting out, we haven’t even had our first game yet, so all of the little things that happened tonight can be fixed, and once we get out there I’m positive we’ll do very well.”
The Tar Heels competed with their seven new freshman, who make up the number eight recruiting class in the nation according to PrepVolleyball.com, for the first time in Carmichael arena. But for freshman Paige Neuenfeldt, the integration was less jarring than the scrimmage location.
“It’s just been really easy to get integrated into this team,” she said. “We definitely have things we can improve on and this showed it, but it was really nice, speaking as a freshman, to get your first game-like scenario thing out of the way in Carmichael.”
For coach Joe Sagula, the only two weaknesses he saw in the night were things he anticipates working on through the duration of the year.
“There are two things that we need to get better at, and that’s our serving and our passing,” Sagula said. “I’ll say that in the beginning of the season, the middle of the season and the end of the season though. You become a really good team when those two things become solid and tonight we had moments of greatness in there but overall I would say sixty to seventy percent of the time we could’ve done a much better job.”
“We made a lot of unforced errors in serving and in passing, we just need to run a much faster offense and it needs to be much more crisp,” Sagula said. “That’s going to be our biggest need to grow.”
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