The No. 2 ranked Florida State beach volleyball team will start the 2017 season with the Garnet and Gold intra-squad scrimmage on Sunday at11 a.m. on the Seminole Beach Volleyball Courts.
“We are looking forward to the season as a whole,” second-year head coach Brooke Niles said. “We have been training hard and have been putting a lot of work in. It is 10 short weeks and we have to be good every week.”
The Seminoles finished 32-3 in 2016, advancing to the final match in the inaugural NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship in Gulf Shores, Ala., to capture runner-up honors. FSU returns 11 players from last year’s squad, including preseason All-CCSA Team members juniors Tory Paranagua and Vanessa Freire and senior Sierra Sanchez.
“We are super excited,” Sanchez said. “We have the longest off-season of any NCAA sport so we have been grinding and training for seven or eight months and we are ready. We have two seniors that have been here all four years and we have been to the national championship twice and the finals twice. We have most of our players coming back from last year when we were so close. By just missing it by a little bit last year has definitely given us that drive this year.”
While the Seminoles will get a taste of competition facing each other on Sunday, their real season will begin a week later. Florida State will officially begin its seasonMarch 4 with a pair of dual matches against LSU and Stetson in DeLand, Fla.
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News courtesy of Florida State Athletics.
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