Coach McRoberts Weekly Press Conference #5

Ole Miss head volleyball coach Steven McRoberts met with members of the media Monday as part of the fall sports weekly press conference... McRoberts discussed the Rebels SEC home opener and the opening of league play at Florida..

Opening Statement…
"As we discussed last week, it is difficult to open conference play at Florida. We showed that on Friday night. Sometimes with this job, what gets lost is that we are coaching 17-22 year olds. They are trying to figure a lot of stuff out. Sometimes what I lose, personally, is how much of a blast that I'm having doing this, and how much I love working with these young ladies that we have. They do work really hard. They are a focused group. We are looking forward moving on through conference. One thing we talked about after the match was all of the things that we can do better and some of the things that went wrong. We also said we have 17 more matches to play, and let's get our mind right for that. I didn't even realize this, but we have six out of our next eight matches at home. It is tough to play on the roach in the conference, so the fact that we get to play six of our next eight at home helps. We are playing a couple of teams with Georgia and Auburn coming in this weekend that are very good. It's the best our conference has been in five years. It seems like every year when I step up here from year one to year two all the way up to year five, I keep saying this is the best the conference has been. There is not an easy out. Georgia is off to their best start in years. They are coming off a loss at A&M, so I know they hungry to get back to their winning ways. We played them three times last year and all were good matches and match ups. We will have our work cut out for us Friday before we turn around and play Auburn on Sunday. I am really proud for how hard this group is working. I believe that we will start righting the ship and start getting better as we get into conference."

On takeaways from the Florida match...
"As we're building the program trying to get to a spot with the Florida's and Kentucky's in our conference, not only competing but trying to get to the point where we are saying we are beating them instead just competing. We have had times where we competed well with them but just haven't beat them. One of the huge things is confidence- Florida has done it for 20 years. When you walk into their arena, and they are coming off a year where they were national runners-up. They have the confidence about them when they make an error, it doesn't rattle them. We got rattled a few times last Friday. Our serve-receive was not very good. They served us off the floor- 13 aces in three sets. After the match, I said I can't remember a time in 20 years that someone had 13 aces against a team of mine in three sets. When you do that against a team who is ranked 11 in the nation, it hurts. When the ball was in play, we actually competed well and scored some points and defended well. When we could not control the first contact, it really hurt us. When you play a team with the confidence that Florida has and there is blood in the water they just put it away very fast."

The University of Mississippi Athletics

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