Long Beach State Athletics!: Re: Volleyball crushes LMU!

Proud of the way the team has played, especially vs Utah and LMU. Looking and acting like winning teams.

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Great win, and the best complete match I've seen the team play, this year. Keep it up.

This was the first time I've seen Reagan Hope in the middle. I was quite impressed. She's quick, runs the slide well, and was very effective.

Also, Hammaker had a great match, and Izzy Mahaffey's serving was great. Four aces.

First two sets were excellent play. The start of the third set was shaky with mistakes. But, they worked their way out of it, and straightened their play out with fewer mistaks at the end. Great match to build on.

Irvine lost to San Jose, dropping their record to 1-8. I thought they would be much better than that.

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-18,-17, -19

it was really a crisp performance. Serving kept the LMU setter off the net all match, and LMU middles non-existent. not a lot of blocks, which was ok, backcourt was picking up so much and a lot frankly easy to dig out.

that backcourt italian, Polish, Irish lawfirm of Jelinek, Barsochinni, and Mahaffey was just fantastic with their sets, and especially served tight hard serves, getting all 8 of the Beach aces, while none of them got aced, and LMU only got one ace.

some errors, service errors and Mad Max-Pola connection on 3 swings, made set 3 tight up to 16 all, REagan won a good challenge (down to her last again!) to overturn a call.

still Reagan, what in hades are you challenging so early in first set when up by 6 anyway when it's not blatantly obvious and just leaving yourself one challenge left. coaching staff does need to talk about challenge strategy. there was no need to burn that first one. minor detail!

LMU looked sharp vs Brown, and Beach a bit so-so, but Beach with their most consistant performance. Johnson got some nice swings for needed kills last couple of sets.

team has two really solid wins vs. Utah & LMU now, and is a legit top 50 team. now see if they can back it up on tough road trip to Wazzou will will likely contend for the Pac-12 championship.

other thing is Mad Max first sets setting was about the best this year, and she limited her attacking, really nice sets to Hope and again showed that Hamaker middle attack with the fake slide going on. have to credit players and staff making the offense tough to read. hitting high 0.200s vs a quality team

team is looking pretty exciting so far. still cannot believe how much growth in Hamaker's game, some of the best year to year improvement that can happen. She is throwing Haymakers out there.