JAMAAL WAIREGI Staff Writer—

With a fiery passion and burning effort, Big Red’s Women’s Volleyball Team came out victorious in the North Coast Athletic Conference Championship versus Wittenberg, netting the Volleyball Team its first ever NCAC regular-season championship.

The NCAC is an NCAA division three athletic conference between competing colleges in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana in a variety of sports. 

On October 27th, Big Red’s Women’s Volleyball Team contended in a riling home game against Wittenberg University, defeating them in a close 3-2 match.

“We’ve never had more fans than we had at that game,” Sophie Tight ‘23 says. “I had shivers just watching the fans repeat our cheers… it definitely helped us with our result.”

“Other sports teams came and supported us, so it’s nice to really feel like a… community,” Lucy Anderson ‘23 adds.

With Wittenberg University being a consecutive winner of the NCAC Volleyball Tournament, as well as Denison having yet to be NCAC Volleyball Champions, this victory is a monumental outcome of the team’s efforts.

“We set a bunch of goals at the beginning of the season,” Sidney Gossard ‘23 explains, “and to really see those be carried out… it’s really awesome to see it actually pay off.” Sophie Tight affirms this: “It was really validating our team culture”.

This win can be attributed to the great amount of work the volleyball team put into during the 2020-21 academic year. Lucy Anderson recalls the season. 

“All fall we just practiced… We [scrimmaged ourselves] about three different times throughout our fall semester, when our normal season is, and then the spring semester we were able to play a few games”.

2020 brought many challenges the team had to navigate, some still present to a lesser degree.

“I think last year, it wasn’t a good year,” says Coach Cassell. “We trained all year long and, the team worked really, really hard and they could have not done that because we knew we weren’t gonna play matches. But that made the championship even more special”.

All this is possible because of the team’s culture and mindset.

“I’m just a very energetic person,” Jenna Corrao explains, “getting people hyped up…  just letting loose, ‘cause that’s the way that we play.”

“Our team does better when we’re more relaxed,” Sidney Gossard adds. “We look at Volleyball not just as a sport where we compete, it’s genuinely fun… we play better when we’re enjoying it.”

“I think we can pride ourselves in the dedication that volleyball takes,” Tight says, “We’re all pursuing completely different academic paths–we’ve got lots of different things going on, it’s not just volleyball–and the fact that we can come here and compete and also enjoy our team… that requires a lot of dedication.”

2020 was a taxing year. The fire, once burning, now petered out to a pile of ash; but, in the case of Big Red’s Volleyball Team, it is possible to rise from the ashes as a phoenix.