Unity breeds success

Just 24 hours after a convincing victory over rival Eastern Washington in the Big Sky Conference Championship, Portland State learned its fate, as the team will travel to Seattle to take on Washington in a first-round match on Friday.

The announcement on Sunday evening came as no surprise to head coach Michael Seemann and his players, who expected to be paired up with the Huskies if they earned the Big Sky Conference’s automatic berth in the NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championship.
The match will offer the Vikings an opportunity to avenge an early-season loss to Washington on Sept. 5, and comes as just one further step in the evolution of the volleyball program at Portland State.

The Vikings will enter the tournament with literally no success in their postseason history since joining the Division I ranks, but with Friday’s match looming it would be easy for the Vikings to forget about what it took for them to make it to this point.

“This season was tough on us,” Seemann said following the championship match on Saturday night. “We went through a lot of things both on the court and off of it. I wouldn’t change anything now, but I wasn’t always sure we would make it to this point.”

Seemann specifically mentioned a difficult stretch that occurred in mid-November, when the club suffered through two defeats, both sweeps, to Eastern Washington and Sacramento State.

Up to that point, Portland State had defeated seven consecutive opponents, but Seemann said the team had yet to truly mesh together or find their collective identity.

“I think it took a couple of losses for us to wake up and realize that something needs to change in the way that we are approaching things,” Seemann said.

The losses not only forced the Vikings to come together for self-reflection, but also motivated the team to forget their past struggles and work towards their one and only preseason goal: winning the Big Sky and playing in the NCAA Tournament.

“I think those tough experiences really brought us together and gave us confidence in each other,” said junior setter Nique Fradella, who was named the Most Valuable Player of the conference tournament. “We needed to refocus and to believe in each other’s abilities.”

In addition to the turmoil that the Vikings were working through, Seemann and his staff were refining their rotation for what seemed like the umpteenth time this season.

While the Vikings have featured a steady dose of junior outside hitters Jennifer Oney and Marija Vojnovic all season, as well as Fradella and lone senior libero Jalen Pendon-Thomas, the rest of the rotation has been a mixture of both old and new, and both offensive- and defensive-minded.

The result of the revolving door of substitutions was inconsistency and unsteady play on the court from the Vikings.

“We have been through a lot this season,” said sophomore outside hitter Christy Hamilton, one of the players affected by the frequent substitutions. “Last season we all knew what to expect, but there were times when we didn’t know what to expect and that made it tough this season.”

According to Seemann, the team reached a boiling point during several difficult practices that preceded the Big Sky Championships.

“We worked really hard and the team really came together during that time,” Seemann said. “For whatever reason, we had all lost a little faith in each other.”

The end result was a team that played more relaxed and with a newfound confidence after their trip through the refining fire.

“We played so strong tonight,” Hamilton said, after being named to the Big Sky All-Tournament Team. “We played together and with focus. We knew that we had the support of the coaches and the team. We all wanted to win together.”

Seemann, who deployed a different starting lineup during the tournament than the team that Portland State fans had grown accustomed to, transformed the team with two fresh new and young faces in redshirt freshmen Tracy Vargas and Nicole Bateham.

As unlikely as the two candidates seemed, each provided a solid presence to help push the Vikings into the first round of the NCAA Volleyball Championship.

Vargas, who joined Hamilton and Fradella on the conference all-tournament team, dominated a talented and athletic Eagles team at the net. Her final statistics of five kills and eight blocks are not completely indicative of the balls she affected and the way she altered the Eastern Washington attack.

Bateham, playing in the back row alongside Pendon-Thomas, provided the extra defense that the Vikings have needed all season, and her precise passing eased the burden on Fradella and the Vikings’ offensive attack.

With the Big Sky season in the rearview mirror, and the Vikings looking more and more like the unified and talented squad that most expected they would be all season, only one task remains.

Taking on the best, but this time as a cohesive unit.