Men’s Club Volleyball recently competed and made it to the semifinals in their EIVA Divisional Tournament, hosted by Liberty University, on Saturday, March 22nd.
Matches were played as best two out of three with the possible third game to fifteen points.
Missing two of their starting players, first year junior, Alex James, stepped up to fill in the outside hitter position. In their first match of the day against the higher seeded Duke, the team struggled early on to provide a strong offense which cost them greatly losing the first game, 18-25. However, the match was far from over and the players were not ready to give up. Having warmed up in the first, the second game went their way as they battled to hold the lead throughout to win 25-22, bringing about the third game. Trading points back and forth, both teams had multiple match point possibilities, but in the end GMU was finally able to finish out the match winning 28-26.
GMU faced a tough JMU A team in the next match, losing 16-25 in the first and 19-25 in the second. Their final opponent, NC State, put up some good competition but not enough to keep us at bay as GMU won 25-17, 25-22, sending them into the semifinals for the fourth time this year. The semifinals pitted the team against a dominant Virginia Tech A team who are known to be a strong and well developed program. Despite this, GMU was able to stick with them through much of the match making them work for their spot in the finals. VT A bested them winning 20-25, 21-25.
Overall Mason Men’s Club Volleyball had a great showing in the tournament and were rewarded for their hard work with yet another semifinals appearance. The team plans to keep on working and are determined to continue having positive results. Who knows, maybe they’ll even win the tournament next year; we’ll just have to wait and see.