Dawgs In Control In Second Europe Match

MARIBOR, Slovenia -- One day after splitting four sets with the Slovenian National Team, the Huskies faced a younger version of the SNT today in their second match of their foreign tour. Washington played the U19 Slovenian squad, which had five players crossing over from the main national team. Today, the Husky size and experience was too tough, and UW won all four sets played at the Dras Center.
 
Scores of the four sets were 25-13, 25-15, 25-11, and 25-19, all for the Dawgs. Washington started the match with the same lineup as on Monday, with Ella May Powell at setter, Claire Hoffman and Shannon Crenshaw at outside, Madi Endsley at opposite, Marin Grote and Sophie Summers in the middle, and Lauren Bays at libero.
 
In later sets, Molly Wilson got an extensive run at setter, Sianna Houghton played a couple sets at libero, Audra Wilmes started at outside hitter, and Olivia Mikkelsen (setter/DS) and Maeve Griffin (DS) came in as well.
 
After the match, senior Shannon Crenshaw talked about what she's seen from the Slovenian style of play over the last two days.
 
"We talked a lot about our strategy coming into this," said Crenshaw. "We really wanted to take a mindset of adjusting as we play. Playing our volleyball but responding quickly to how they play. We talked about having volleyball I.Q., and recognizing things that they're doing, and then adjusting our tactics to them quickly. It's been really fun to play them. We're seeing different kinds of players, different celebrations and different kinds of gyms, things like that. Afterwards we do our jersey swaps and they're always really excited to talk to us, so it's been really fun.
 
"The biggest difference right now is the ball that we're using. It has more of a pop, and so we've been talking about ball control and if there's a really fast serve, then working to keep it off the net because it will bounce hard off our platform. We had some overpasses, so today we were looking at seeing the serve early, identifying if it was a hard serve, getting it off the net, keeping balls in play and extending rallies. Things are a little bit different here but we're still trying to play our volleyball."

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