Just like that another year is in the books. Through the many miles on the road and the late night practices, many memories were made. Fighting through injuries, snow storms, and the long drives through flat never-ending states; we survived. We laughed, we fought, we had our share of sand kicked in our face, but we kept pushing forward.
To start off the year, we came out of the gates guns blazing. We stayed above .500 throughout the first semester. We started with an impressive showing at the Miami tournament and had some individual developments at the Cornhusker Clash at UNL. To round out our first half, we had a strong performance at our home tournament and despite finishing below .500 at the WMU tournament, we saw more individual improvements out of some players. We really felt like a team to beat and showed a lot of promise going into the second half of the season. However, things did not go as we thought.
Starting the second half we lost some personnel to graduation and had a regression on the court. This was evident especially at the GVSU tournament. We hosted a home tournament with our alumni and had some fun. Then it was off to war, the War tournament at Akron, Ohio was not our best showing but we saw some big-time moments from some of our guys. We dealt with quite a few injuries that sidelined some guys throughout the last part of the season that prevented some guys from really growing and developing as players. On top of that, we had a lot of inconsistency during games. There were times where we really had everything working and then in the blink of an eye the tables were turned against us. We were not overly thrilled with how our nationals experience turned out, going 1-2 on Saturday and a first-round exit in the championship bracket.
In the end, we achieved a lot of what we set out to do but ultimately came up short on some of our bigger goals. Even though the season didn’t go quite like we planned, we did see improvements from the previous season and makes us feel like we are heading in the right direction. We not only played more games than we did the previous season, but we also doubled the number of wins we had. Our team is looking forward to next year, we feel like we have a solid atmosphere and a talented group returning as well as a good leadership group at the head of the helm. We are excited to see what is in store. We want to thank all of our seniors this year as you were a big part of why we had such success and showed are returners how the game should be played! Until next season rollneers!