After splitting last week’s road games, the UTPB volleyball team will get to welcome the defending NCAA Division II champions West Texas A&M in this weekend’s contest.
The Falcons, however, just need to worry about playing against Cameron first before looking ahead to West Texas A&M.
UTPB returns home this week to play three games in a four-day stretch, starting with Cameron at 6 p.m. Friday, followed by West Texas A&M at 2 p.m. Saturday and Western New Mexico at 6 p.m. Monday.
With Lone Star Conference play well underway, UTPB head coach Tim Loesch and his players enter this week at 10-4, 1-2.
The Falcons are avoiding the temptation to look too far past Cameron (3-13, 0-4) as Loesch and his players try to take it one game at a time.
“That’s always a challenge,” Loesch said. “We faced that this past weekend. … we have to focus on Cameron, first. We have to put our best line up out there and play as hard as we can and hopefully win in three and then worry about West Texas A&M. We’ll do a little prep for all three teams this weekend but mostly, our challenge is our side of the set. We’re just trying to work on our skills and consistency and focusing on what we’re doing on our side of the net.”
UTPB is coming off a split from last week’s road games in which the Falcons defeated Midwestern State 3-0 on Friday in Wichita Falls before losing to Texas Woman’s University in straight sets the following day in Denton.
“It was a good weekend,” Loesch said. “We split our matches. We were able to defeat Midwestern State before losing a close match to TWU. It was our second time playing TWU. We played them tighter and better than we did the first time but still not where we want. We have a lot of stuff to work on. We have three matches this weekend. We have a long weekend with three matches.”
UTPB also lost to Texas Woman’s in straight sets at a nonconference tournament game back on Sept. 16 at Lubbock Christian.
UTPB defeated Midwestern State (3-13, 0-4) by scores of 25-22, 25-20, 29-27.
The Falcons lost to Texas Woman’s (11-4, 3-1) by scores of 25-20, 25-19, 25-18.
“Texas Woman’s is a good team,” Loesch said. “They did what we expected them to do. We got off to a bit of a slow start in a couple of sets and tried to come back and almost did. I think that was the difference with getting off to a slow start. It makes it really hard against good teams to be successful. But we passed better. Our offense was better. There was a lot of good things on our offense. Our defense and serving wasn’t able to slow them down as much as we had hoped. That’s something we’re going to continue to work on this week.”
Still, despite the split, the Falcons were able to breathe a sigh of relief, getting their first conference win out of the way last week after a two-game losing skid.
Loesch and his players know just how difficult conference play will be.
Case in point, West Texas A&M (13-2, 3-1) has already lost its first game in conference, losing to Dallas Baptist in five sets back on Sept. 22.
“It looks like it’s going to be a dog fight again in the conference and the defending national champion has been beaten and there’s still four teams undefeated in our league.” Loesch said. “It’s going to be a war.”
Angelo State (14-2, 4-0) remains in a three-way tie for first in the standings along with Arkansas-Fort Smith (12-3, 4-0) and Dallas Baptist (11-4, 4-0).
West Texas A&M is currently fifth in the conference as the Buffaloes look to repeat as LSC and national champions.
“They return almost their entire team from last year,” Loesch said. “To replace the one key piece they lost, they brought in a similar player. They’re going to attack the ball well. They make few errors and play tenacious defense so we’re going to have to match that with a stronger offense. We have to defend their key one or two players on offense well. I expect it to be a good match.”
UTPB currently sits in 12th out of the 17 teams in the Lone Star Conference.
Western New Mexico is currently 3-7, 0-5, sitting in 15th place, only ahead of Cameron and Midwestern State.
Cameron enters the weekend coming off a loss in three sets to St. Edward’s at home this past Saturday.
As far as improvements go, Loesch said his team needs to get better on passing, setting and attacking.
“You can’t do one without the other,” Loesch said. “We need to increase our offense. We’ve done better in the last couple of matches with that but we have to continue to fight hard to score and put pressure on the other team and not make it easy for them. Cameron’s a similar team to Midwestern State. They’re going to come in and fight hard. They’re a more one-dimensional team. They have one player that they go to a lot. We’ll have to work on our defense to slow her down. It’s mostly our side. We just need to continue to be more consistent and aggressive. Little better offense, little better defense. It’s the battle throughout the season.”
