As the dog days of summer continue on, so do the Belgreen High School Lady Bulldogs’ preparations for the 2024 volleyball season.
Last week, Belgreen hosted a play date with four other schools—Tharptown, Meek, Colbert Heights, and Cherokee—giving the Lady Bulldogs an opportunity to receive some match day experience before the start of the regular season in the fall.
Due to various circumstances like vacations and church trips, Belgreen head coach Alison Terry, who was hired to take over the program on June 11th, said she didn’t have her entire complement of players for the exhibitions, but she was pleased with what she saw from her squad.
“We just put together the best rotations we could for these play dates, and I got to see how some girls worked under pressure,” she said. “I was very pleased with all of their effort.
“I was very, very pleased with how it all went,” Terry added.
Encouraging for Terry at this point, she said, is her team’s coachability.
“They were very open to instruction,” Terry said. “They did what I asked them to do, and if you do what I ask you to do then you can be successful.
“I just told them, ‘This is a ship and I’m the captain of this ship and I promise I won’t let you drown,’” she added.
Terry said the Lady Bulldogs focused on in-game situations. Once the real matches begin, she said, there’s no time to go over that kind of instruction.
“I told the other coaches that I wanted to use this as a learning tool because, of course, in the regular season you can’t go on the court and show them where to go and explain things,” Terry said. “I let all the coaches know exactly what it was going to be—it’s a coaching experience with live game situations so we can go out there and explain stuff to the girls.”
Playing against other teams during the play date has also given Terry and her coaching staff an idea of where they most need to improve, both tactically and mentally.
“My main takeaway is we’ve got to work on certain defensive coverages and offensive coverages,” Terry said. “I also told the girls, too, that no matter how fast- or slow-paced the game is, you can’t ever relax. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a server who’s served 20 points in-a-row, you still better be ready. Don’t ever, ever get lax in volleyball because as soon as you get lax something happens.
“I want them to be on their toes at all times and super scrappy,” Terry added.
The Lady Bulldogs’ roster is still a work in progress. Belgreen has two seniors with different levels of experience playing volleyball, Terry said, but the roster is mostly comprised of underclassmen. There will be plenty of competition for spots on the varsity roster, she said.
“We’re really ninth and 10th-grade heavy, so these girls are really going to have to fight for their positions,” Terry said. “If you’re good enough for varsity, you’re going to be on varsity; if you’re not, you’re not. But I feel like all of these girls are going to put up the fight to show me where they need to be.
“(Junior varsity) and varsity are really going to have to fight for where they belong,” she added.
As Belgreen irons out its personnel questions, Terry is also shaping her goals and expectations for her first year in charge of the program. Right now, the Lady Bulldogs want to start small and work their way up.
“We’re going to set our goals small and meet them as we go through the season. We’re going to go game by game,” Terry said. “First we have county and then it’ll be area and then it’s going to be super regionals, so we’re just going to set these goals as we go through the season and try to accomplish them.
“Sometimes when you set a goal like we’re going to win state this year, that’s too big of a goal to set for these girls at the beginning of the season,” Terry added. “We’ve got to get the small things rolling before we can make it to our big goal. Of course, (a state championship) is our goal, but we’ve got to meet these smaller goals before we can make it there.”
