Rocket volleyball team is looking to rebuild winning spirit

In the past few years, the Spencer volleyball team has struggled to win games and play effectively as a team. With a team that has both experience and cohesion among its members, the Rockets are taking steps this season to regain their winning spirit and find ways to improve their game, building their team to be stronger for the coming years.

Alicia Herman is in her second year of coaching the Spencer volleyball team, which has 32 total members this year, 12 of which will be playing varsity positions. Looking at the group, Herman said the team this year has the unusual combination of both youth and experience; the result of having younger players taking on varsity positions for the past few years.

“We’re young and we have a good amount of experience,” she said. “Ever since COVID, we have had some of our younger players play up for varsity. For example, we have Hallie (Meyer), she’s a sophomore, but she has a full year of varsity experience. Alexa (Stange) also played full time on varsity last year and Hannah Schreiner played since she was a freshman.”

This experience on the varsity level, Herman said, will help the team as it goes along this season. But the experience also helps in team cohesion. By this point, many of the girls have worked together on the team, and Herman said she has seen the girls cooperating on a level she hasn’t seen in a while. That cohesion, she said, will give the Rockets an advantage that will be hard for other teams to replicate.

“The girls work well together,” she said. “This is the best band that I have seen in a while. That is what you need in order to be successful as a team.”

The other component that the team needs, Herman said, is a winning spirit. In the past, she said she has noticed the attitude of the team when taking losses wasn’t good. Instead of looking for ways to improve and learn from their mistakes, she said they would often respond to the loss as inevitable, with so many outside factors contributing to their failure. That attitude needs to change, she said, starting with the idea that the Rockets can’t do anything to change their losing streak.

“We haven’t had a whole lot of success over the years,” she said. “We need to figure out how to win at volleyball again. We need to look inward, at ourselves. In the past, there has been a lot of blame put on outside factors, things we couldn’t control. We need to change that and look at ourselves to find out what we can do to improve and change. We need to ask ourselves what we need to do to fix things.”

At this point in the season, the Rockets have yet to win a game, but Herman said she has already seen improvements in the team’s playing style.

“Based on what I have seen, playing has improved,” she said. “We are becoming smarter hitters. We are not hard hitting, we are smart hitting.”

There are two seniors on the varsity Spencer volleyball team this year in Kaelyn Schreiner and Samantha Soback. Juniors are Claudia Krause, Hannah Reckner and Hayly Smith and the sophomore group consists of Shelby Frisch, Hannah Schreiner, Alina Jackson, Alexa Stange and Hallie Meyer. The team will also have two freshmen in Alexa Weber and Adeline Foley.

CHEYENNE THOMAS/STAFF PHOTO