With a new head coach and a good deal of inexperience on the court, the Cal volleyball team figures to be a work in progress.
If Friday’s performance against Dartmouth on the first day of the Cal Classic is a benchmark, the Golden Bears appear to be progressing quite well.
Cal hit for its highest percentage in four years and held its opponent to its lowest percentage in almost seven, and the Golden Bears rolled past the Big Green 25-14, 25-14, 25-7 at Haas Pavilion.
The Bears (3-1) hit .419 as a team, their highest clip since registering a .421 percentage against Cal Poly on Sept. 12, 2013. Cal also held the Big Green to a -.087 percentage, the lowest an opponent has hit against the Bears since Cal held Gardner-Webb to a -.139 clip on Sept. 3, 2010.
“We are doing some great things,” first-year coach Matt McShane said. “We are hitting for a high percentage. The defense we are running is different and we are still getting accustomed to it. We are playing well.”
Senior Antzela Dempi had six kills and four aces while fellow senior Christine Alftin added six kills as well. Redshirt junior Ashten Smith-Gooden made her first appearance since missing the second half of last season with a knee injury and had three kills in four swings.
After dropping their first match of the season to UC Irvine, the Bears have won three in a row. They are hitting .358 in their past two matches against Seattle and Dartmouth.
“I thought we played steady,” McShane said. “We still have some things we need to clean up a little bit, but I thought for the first match of the weekend, we played well. The enthusiasm was good and we enjoyed the moment.”
Friday marked the second time this season Dempi has had four aces in a match and she now has 10 already this season. Dempi entered the season with just four career aces, and began the week tied for sixth in the Pac-12 in service aces per set.
Cal had eight aces as a team, the most in a match since it registered 12 against Army on Sept. 11, 2015.
Smith-Gooden, the former No. 5 recruit out of high school who has been plagued by knee injuries during her Cal career and is also a Type 1 diabetic, made her first appearance in a match since last Oct. 23 at UCLA.
“We’ve been looking forward to seeing Ashten play,” McShane said. “We saw some of her brilliance tonight.”
The Bears return to action in the Cal Classic on Saturday with matches against Eastern Washington and Texas Tech.
Press Release courtesy of Cal Athletics.
Leave a Reply