By Avery Jennings – Collegiate Staff
The Grand Rapids Community College volleyball team is red hot heading into the rest of the season.
“I think they’re, collectively, just better,” Kellogg Community College coach Tim VanWienen said. “[They’re] more athletic than we are. They’re bigger, they’re mentally tougher than we are. They are just a good, solid program …They out served us and mentally they were just tougher than we were.”
The Raiders won 3-0, shutting out KCC and climbing back up to .500 on the season.
“I think we will do really well ,” Lauren Wieber, a freshmen at GRCC, said about the rest of the season. “If we keep playing like we are playing, then we’ll go really far.”
The women have been playing well lately, currently on a six-game winning streak, and are happy to be on the right track.
With a successful performance in the Raider Challenge Volleyball Invitational, finishing 4-0, the girls are gaining momentum for the tough teams they’ll face in the future.
“We kind of made that an emphasis [finishing 4-0 in the tournament],” GRCC Head coach Chip Will said. “I wanted to really focus on that tournament and build some momentum.”
The team is happy with the way they have been playing, and only concerned with winning each game from here on out.
“Obviously you want to win, but you want to play well when you win, and that was the really nice thing. I thought we played some of our best volleyball, all year, over the weekend,” Will said.
The Raiders will have a week of practice, and then it’s off to Muskegon Community College for a tough game against the Jayhawks.
“Muskegon will be tough, but obviously for us, with starting slow, every match is important you know,” Will said. “We can’t afford to really drop [matches] anymore, so you know that’s the one mindset that the kids have taken.”
The mindset for the team going forward is going to be win, and work for the win. They will only improve from here on out and look to continue the momentum they’ve built up over the past few games. The women are hopeful that with the current momentum that they have, they will continue to improve as the season progresses.
“It’s [about] getting better each day. I think we have kind of taken that mentality of getting better each day, regardless of who we are playing, whether it’s in practice or in a match.”
