According to Grace Fleckenstein ’19, getting the perfect serve is all about mentality.“Volleyball is so mental. If you have any doubts in your head that you’re going to miss a serve, you probably will, even if you’ve served thousands and thousands of balls,” Fleckenstein said.
However, the mental components in volleyball differ from other sports.“Since it’s a team sport, you can’t get in your own head because it will create islands, and we can’t have six individual islands on the team,” said Rylee Fay ’20, a member of the volleyball team.
The key to getting that perfect serve is knowing how to recover from the bad ones. “I just brush it off. I focus on [the fact that] this is a team sport,” said Haley Gallagher ’19, explaining how she and the team recover from their mistakes.
“You have to play [as] one team. Your teammates have to have trust in you and have to know that you’re going to come back with the next pass or … whatever you do next,” said Gallagher.
The team strives to leave their personal lives behind when stepping onto the court. “Our coach says … Be where your shoes are,’” Fleckenstein said. “So if we’re in the gym, we’re supposed to leave all outside things outside of the gym.”
The still-recent death of Caroline Found continues to put day-to-day struggles into perspective. Every year, the team visits the tree for Found, writing something down on a ribbon and tying it to the tree to honor her life.
“That was such a big event that happened,” said Fay, recalling the accident that took Found’s life.
“[There are] little things in our lives that you bring into the court; there could be something so much worse that could happen to us, and we just need to let everything that isn’t big [not] affect us, because something could happen any day,” Fay said.
In the end, getting that perfect serve all comes down to being a team.“We’re teammates, and we all are trying to accomplish the same goal,” Gallagher said. “You can’t let your problems affect you when you step onto the court. I feel like if you do it, affects the whole team’s mojo.”