The home stretch begins!

Hey everyone!

Glad to be back and writing to you guys again! We're now in the second half of our season and on our way to the end of the season and everything we work for, AUS playoffs and the possibility of advancing to CIS Nationals! So here's what's been happening so far.

Over the Christmas break we hosted Guelph University, for a series of scrimmages and official games. On Friday January 3rd we started off with a practice in the morning with Guelph, during which each team split into 2 squads to scrimmage against each other. It was a great warm up for the match that night and a chance to shake off some rust and see what our opponent was bringing to the table.
That night we beat Guelph in 5 sets, a hard fought match where we played very up and down but pulled out a win.
Saturday we had another morning scrimmage session, which really got everybody excited for the nights rematch. We took Guelph in 3 sets that night for the big win, we really upped our consistency and felt we played a better game, not giving up to any pushes by Guelph.

Now we're smack back into the season, we headed on the road to Sherbrooke for the third and last interlock tournament of the year. Our first match was against Montreal on Friday January 17th, the 6:00 pm game time. We went up 2 sets to none to start off the match, resisting some pushes by Montreal and their strong middle play. They came right back us though and won the next 2 sets, bringing it to a 5th set. We pulled out the win in the 5th set by jumping out to an early lead and not giving it up.

Saturday we started off at 11 am with a big game against Laval. An unfortunately similar scenario to last night repeated, where after going up 2 sets to none, we were playing another fifth set. We couldn't pull out the win in this one, succumbing to inconsistent play, and errors at some crucial times. We finished off with a 4 set loss to hosts Sherbrooke at 8 pm that night.

This was not the way we wanted to start the second half of the season, but now it's behind us and we need to focus on what is ahead of us, 2 games against memorial this weekend, then 2 against DAL to finish off the regular season. Then we move into playoffs to see who represents the AUS at nationals.