The Gustavus Women’s Volleyball team has an arduous schedule ahead.  In the next 10 days, the team will travel to St. Paul for three matches against MIAC foes before travelling to Indianola, Iowa for the Simpson Invitational on Oct. 15.

The Gusties are currently ranked 11th in the MIAC after posting a record of 6-9 overall in the first half of the season, including a conference record of 1-3. The team will face Hamline and St. Catherine in their next two matches, who join Gustavus in representing the bottom three teams in the conference. This stretch represents a crucial set of conference games, determining the fate of a squad that must make up ground in the standings.

“I wouldn’t say we can’t lose [another] game, but losing would affect our overall confidence in making it to the [conference] tournament,” Senior defensive specialist and Captain Jenny Ewert said. The Gusties hope to gather momentum in these two games—success they will need in order to compete with St. Thomas in a matchup Oct. 13 in St. Paul.

The Tommies are second in the MIAC with a 16-3 record and represent a tough mid-season test, bookending a series of conference games that will determine Gustavus’s outlook for the playoffs.

Gustavus hopes to improve upon a 2009 season that resulted in a 9th place finish in the MIAC. The Gusties are doing so with new Head Coach Rachelle Dosch, a 2007 graduate of St. Thomas. Despite her youth, Dosch brings in plenty of experience and energy needed to build a successful program.

“She’s really intense, but this style of coaching pushes me to get better,” First-year outside hitter Dana Boerboom said. Dosch had a record-setting playing career at St. Thomas which included all-American honors as an outside hitter for the Tommies. Dosch has taken the competitiveness and intensity from her playing days and infused them into her team, which has resulted in a change in mentality and a hunger to improve.

“In practice we do a lot of drills where if you make an error, there’s a consequence,”  Ewert said. “The past few years we haven’t had consequences; the errors have just been looked at as errors. No one asked us ‘why are you making these errors? Fix them.’” Head Coach Bosch reminds her players every day to fix their mistakes by pushing them both physically and mentally.

One Gustie who adheres to this new philosophy is Boerboom, who has blossomed into a starter and a catalyst for the front line. “She wasn’t afraid of the competition,” Ewert said. “A lot of [first-years] come in and look timid, and  they don’t want to overstep boundaries. She was the one that said, ‘If you push me, I’ll push you back.’” Boerboom is second on the team in kills with 139 and has proved to be a lethal asset in the offensive attack.

Although the Gusties appear to be a long shot for the regular season conference title, there remains motivation to finish the season strong. “There are only three or four top teams right now who have won the majority of their games, so there is still a really good chance that we can make it [to the playoffs],”  Ewert said.

The bottom six teams in the MIAC all have 1-3 conference records, leaving a lot of room for change in the next few weeks of conference play. A few more conference wins, and the Gusties could launch themselves into the upper half of the MIAC standings, which would place them in contention for a spot in the conference playoffs Nov. 2-6, 2010. The playoffs feature only the top four teams in the conference, so there is still plenty of work to be done.

Ascending the standings should be a reasonable goal if the Gusties can manage to limit errors, which has been a problem thus far. Gustavus has made 334 errors compared to 294 errors committed by its opponents. Even more glaring have been the errors made on the service line. Gustavus has committed 112 errors on serves compared to 72 service errors committed by opponents.

“We’re all really challenging each other to not make those mistakes,” Ewert said. “We have this system where if someone misses a serve, the next person has to get it in not only to keep the ball in play, but to pick up a teammate.” The Gusties will remain in the hunt for a playoff berth as long as they limit mistakes and rely on a lethal front line that is hungry for the kill.