Setting Up For Post Season

This year’s Rustler lady line ups for varsity volleyball are the players, Payton Kilker, Cynthia Ford, Patricia Lammers, Tyra Gates, Aleah Schlechter, Journey Palmer, Jaden Werdel, Shaylee Anderberg, Ally Mullaney, Ruby Carder, Abbi Blake, Heather Resel, and Taya Pawlowski. The respected coaches include head coach, Linda DeBoer and assistant coaches, Stephanie Edwards and Karen Rogers. I interviewed coach DeBoer to get her take on this year’s volleyball team, her hopes, and predictions for the future and more. How do you feel the seasons been going? I asked. “This season has been kind of a roller coaster ride, we lost a couple five set matches early on in the year that I felt we should win, and then we were starting to feel a little down about ourselves because of not being able to finish those matches, and then we switched offenses and that sort of rejuvenated everybody’s passion and fire and energy, and ever since then we've been playing a lot better, I think our new offense highlights certain peoples strengths and their assets and that betters us as a team.” I asked, what's the outlook for the rest of this upcoming season and games? “We have Highmore tomorrow night, who is a conference opponent, we already played them in the central conference tournament and we beat them 2-0 in the tournament, however that was a month ago so I'm sure they have improved as the season has gone on but I'm looking for a victory tomorrow night and then next week we start region play which will be way different for us this year being in Class B instead of Class A, so we're going to have to play an extra night than what we're used to, it looks like we're going to be the number three seed, which means we will get a bye on Monday and have to play #6 on Tuesday, and that is looking like it's either going to be Herried Selby or Ipswich, neither of which we have played already this season, so we will have a new opponent, if we are victorious that night, or when we are victorious on Tuesday, we will face off with Potter County, who we lost to earlier this year, however the night we played Potter County was the first night we tried our new offense, and I think we're much better at it now and stronger than we were then so I am looking forward to these girls winning regions and getting into that Sodak-16 match.” I asked her next “What are some highlights of the season so far?” she responded “We won the big Dakota conference, which was exciting because that was a chance for us to beat an undefeated Mobridge at the time, we beat them, and we were able to have avenged our earlier lost to a winner in that tournament also. We won our bracket in the Redfield tournament, which was exciting, I would say one of the biggest successes this season has been all the individual growth that the girls have shown in their skills and them coming together as a team and playing cohesively together, that's been one of our strengths and one of our biggest successes I think.” Any funny stories you'll remember this year by? “The common joke is that “Is Abbi Blake concussed or is it just Abbi?” we constantly ask her questions, then we try to figure out, could she be concussed or is that just Abbi? and that's kind of a long-standing joke. The way the substitutes cheer is quite entertaining at times, they are very energetic on the bench, when they're out of the match our substitutes celebrate with all kinds of fun things. They bowl and they do the Wii thing, they have some funny sayings, when a ball goes long, they yell “frequent flyer!” there is a lot of fun I think being had by the team so that's a couple things I will always remember is, “is Abbi concussed or is it just Abbi?” and the way our substitutes celebrate is just awesome, because they keep the energy so high.”