Michigan State University Athletics
Stanford 3, MSU 1
12/8/2014 12:00:00 AM | Volleyball
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Michigan State Head Coach Cathy George
Coach George on team improving over the season ...
"We have 13 freshmen and sophomores, so we have a very young team. We did play the 11th strongest schedule in the country so we started off in a tough way and didn't always get on the runs we wanted to get.
"We saw steady improvement throughout the year and with so many young kids contributing we needed to find a mix. We graduated four starters last year, so we were trying to find our identity as the year went on and as we continued to gel you could see things starting to click.
"We didn't get that turned around until the second half of the Big Ten season and thankfully the NCAA Committee saw something in us. They saw us starting to rally and put us in the tournament and gave us the opportunity to do what we did this weekend."
Coach George on her setter Rachel Minarick ...
"We did have a 6-2 going in the beginning of the year, but we had our other setter [junior Halle Peterson] go down in the Oregon match - tore her labrum and dislocated her shoulder - so that was the end of that for a while.
"We started off at the beginning of the year going back and forth with whether we wanted to do a 6-2 or not. Our setter you saw [Rachel Minarick] is a very good attacker as well and had attacked throughout her high school career, so we could play around with some of those things ...
"We had some versatility that we thought we could use to our advantage that we weren't able to use for a while. I had a couple other injuries that factored in as we were trying to find the right lineups, so it didn't really settle in until the second half with the lineup we thought could work and with the healthy players returning to 100 percent.
"She [Rachel Minarick] is very good. She's very talented. She was one of the top recruits. I'm not sure where she ended up rated, but she was a top kid nationally."
Coach George on what she takes out of the performance from her young team ...
"We battled pretty hard. We could've rolled over after game two. Obviously the middles are pretty physical and it was a mismatch there in size. Both of [Stanford's] middles were hitting over .450, but we needed to contain other players. We needed to battle back.
"I was proud of our team and how we answered in games three and four and found ourselves in it in game four. With a little turn here or there maybe we could've pushed that to game five. We all know game fives are, who knows, game fives are a coin toss.
"Stanford contained Alyssa Garvelink at the start of the match, another freshman out on the court for us. I'm not sure where she was after two games for us in the kills, but she ended up having 13 kills and hitting .346, so I was pleased with the way as a freshman she bounced back and showed was she was starting to do at the end of the season for us."
Coach George on having experience from tough competition ...
"I liked the way our team bounced back early in the season. I didn't think we did that very well. We were young and showed that youth but matured over the year and learned how to respond in tough situations."
