As the losses piled up at the hands of Big 12 Conference opponents, the Colorado Buffaloes volleyball team saw their season fall short of glory. With the season over, one question lingers: What went wrong?
For sophomore outside hitter Becah Fogle, 19, nothing went wrong. There was just something missing.
“Since we didn’t have a deep team, we could have used more girls,” Fogle said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say anything went wrong, we just could have used more players. Before every single game, I was prepared for fighting for a game.”
A season that began with a victory over Valparaiso in straight sets ended with five consecutive defeats. The players attributed their struggles to a lack of depth, citing more athletes were needed.
Freshman outside hitter Kerra Schroeder, a 19-year-old from San Diego, Calif., said lack of players added pressure on the squad.
“We worked hard and improved, every single match we improved,” Schroeder said. “But we will have the same desire. Nothing went wrong, and we improved a lot.”
Colorado lost two players midseason, junior Ellen Henry and sophomore Alex Penewell, due to undisclosed reasons. Their departure may have shaken an already small roster, which Schroeder noted as detrimental.
“By the end of the last match, we had only a few girls,” Schroeder said. “We had players that were injured pretty bad. If you are practicing two hours a day, your body wears out.”
Fogle said she and her teammates learned perseverance as they navigated through the tough season, despite the shortage of players on the roster.
“I think with such a few number of girls we made it through the season fighting hard,” Fogle said. “We got what we wanted out if it in terms of knowing how to compete at a collegiate level.”
Winning only two games in the Big 12, the Buffs ended their season 7-22, which barely steered them away from tying the two worst seasons in school history. In the program’s first year in 1986 and in 2007, CU won just six games.
The five non-conference wins came from three different tournaments, two of which were outside of Colorado. At the Yale Invitational in New Haven, Conn., the Buffs won the first two games for their only two-game winning streak of the season before falling in three sets to the host school.
Outside hitter Rosie Steinhaus, 20, said inexperience may have played a role.
“It was a rebuilding year, we were very young,” Steinhaus said.
Another factor was the new coaching staff. Head coach Liz Kritza arrived in Boulder in spring 2009 after a successful stint at Tulane, a success she was eager to transfer to the Buffs.
Steinhaus said Kritza wants the squad to aim high, and she is hopeful the incoming recruits will do just that.
“She wants a championship program,” Steinhaus said. “It’s hard to see from our record how hard we are working. But [with] the students coming in, we will be able to prove our hard work.”
The 2010 recruiting class includes Elizabeth Reid, an English woman who is training to participate in the 2012 Olympic Games with the British National Team in her native London.
Reid’s talent, in addition to the six other recruits Kritza added, may benefit CU’s depth chart.
As for Steinhaus, who said she will most likely return next year, optimism remains in her conscious.
“It’s hard to say what next year will bring,” Steinhaus said.”[The team will] just keep working on it, and bring some more wins next year, and keep the progress that we made this year. We can’t lose that.”
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Esteban L. Hernandez at Esteban.hernandez@colorado.edu.
