By Players pounded the ground in frustration after letting a kill slam to the ground during the No. 12 Long Beach State men’s volleyball team’s practice Monday afternoon as it prepared to take on No. 5 Pepperdine Thursday night inside the Walter Pyramid.
Booming voices echoed off the walls of the 49ers’ (12-10, 8-9 Mountain Pacific Sports Federation) practice facility as they passed, set and swung to earn the kill in a rotation drill.
At the end of the drill and an exhausting set of sprints that left sweat dripping from their faces, the team huddled together and listened to head coach Alan Knipe as he talked about managing mental errors, reinforcing the team’s yearlong process of believing in itself when faced with adversity.
“Volleyball is a unique sport in the sense that every single play ends in an error,” Knipe said. “It’s just a matter of if it is theirs or ours. You can’t play this game not to make mistakes because then you’re going to make a lot more, but at the same time you can’t play this game with reckless abandonment or you’re going to make errors in bunches.”
In the first matchup on Jan. 24, 49er hitters earned just a .155 hitting percentage to the Waves’ .378 percent. Pepperdine senior opposite hitter Parker Kalmbach crushed a career-high 24 kills during the match.
LBSU sophomore middle blocker Bryce Yould, who registered only one block assist in the last match against USC, said he lacked aggression against the Trojans middles when it came to blocking.
“Pepperdine, they’re a bigger team than we are,” Yould said. “They’re going to have a bigger block than USC. We have to keep playing physical and keep working in transition to give ourselves opportunities against their big block.”
The 49ers topped the No. 16 Stanford Cardinal at the start of the season in their first road match of the year. LBSU posted a season high 51 digs inside the Maples Pavilion, with 16 of them coming from senior libero Ryan Windisch.
The Cardinal are coming off of its first MPSF sweep over UC San Diego and looks to continue a four game winning streak. Sophomore outside hitter Eric Ensing said that the team worked on translating a pass or dig into getting kills.
“We need to take that loss against USC and work to improve our game,” Ensing said. “We’re doing a really good job passing wise, so we got to turn that into our opportunities for attacking and getting smarter swings.”
With only a month left in the season, the 49ers are looking to make the late season push before the playoffs start.
“It’s getting late in the year so everyone is looking to make a push to either try and qualify for the playoffs or to give themselves the best seed for the playoffs,” Knipe said. “Right now what we are working on is what we can do for longer stretches of time and that is what our goal setting for the week.”
The 49ers look to control their mental game as they take on Pepperdine and Stanford Thursday and Saturday, respectively. Both matches are set to commence at 7 p.m.
