Volleyball to Host Tournament and Alumni Game this Weekend
4/23/2009 3:05:00 PM | Volleyball
STATESBORO, GA ? The Georgia Southern volleyball team will host a four-team tournament this weekend to close out the spring off-season schedule. The Eagles welcome Savannah College of Art and Design, Kennesaw State and UAB to Statesboro for a round-robin tournament format on Saturday, April 25. At the conclusion of the tournament, the alumni game is set to take place around 3:30 p.m. in Hanner Fieldhouse.
The team will welcome back around 18-20 alumni for the game on Saturday. Two former coaches will participate in the game as Kerry Messersmith, who reigned from 2001-2005, and J.B. Claiborne, who stood at the helm of the program from 1988-1993, will make a return trip to Statesboro.
Head coach Chad Callihan used
the spring to improve on specific areas from the fall campaign. “We
really wanted to improve our first contact; both with the serve and the
pass. We really wanted to work on limiting our unforced errors as there
were too many points that ended with us - we needed to work harder to
make the opposing team earn their points. So one of the things we've
really talked about is making sure we're challenging the court more and
not taking the hard shot as much.”
The closing tournament will be the fourth for Georgia Southern this spring. The team first traveled to UCF in March for competition, finishing second to Florida State after taking an early match to advance in the afternoon. In April, the Eagles competed at Alabama and most recently played in the SoCon Beach Tournament this past weekend.
Closing out his first
year as head coach, Callihan was pleased with the team's
performance during the spring.
“Spring's been good for us. The spring has really given us an
opportunity to get comfortable in our systems, the way we do things,
our training and techniques; we really never got a chance to do that in
the fall,” said Callihan. “Spring's been good because we've been able
to slow things down and really train well. I think the girls have been
able to adapt to what we want to do technically within the offensive
and defensive systems; just gaining some maturity and strength. I
think our fitness and conditioning is in a much better place than it
was last fall.”
