By John Raffel
Alison Smith is in her second year of coaching a Mount Pleasant volleyball team that is having a strong season. The Oilers are 22-15-3 as of mid October and are 4-2 in the North Division of the Saginaw Valley League.
“I’m very pleased with the way our season has been going,” Smith said. “We’re a very young team. We graduated eight seniors last year, and seven of those eight played pretty much all the time. We lost our complete starting lineup. We have one senior who is starting now, plus two sophomores that start regularly, and three juniors with another sophomore who gets a good chunk of playing time. So we’re very young. We’ve been progressing every week, learning the pace of the game for some of the youngsters at the varsity. We have seemed to have hit a stride where we’re catching up to it.”
Mount Pleasant won the Freeland Invitational at the beginning of September.
“We played very well [recently] against Okemos,” Smith said. “We lost in three games. Game 3 was 15-13. But they are honorable mention-ranked in Class A. We felt we finally got to a place where we were able to compete with bigger, stronger, and more physical teams. We had improved our consistency to where we could go point-for-point with those teams.
The team senior is Lauren McGregor, an outside hitter. “Her playing time last year was minimal,” Smith said. “We have called on her since day one this season to not only be a leader, but to play all the way around. We depend on her for her serving, her serve receive, her defense, and she’s become our go-to outside hitter, ever since day one this season. She has stepped up to the challenge. She continues to work on her leadership skills. I’m not sure I’ve ever coached a woman more competitive than Lauren. That is contagious to her teammates.”
Camdyn Odykirk is a sophomore middle hitter. “She has the highest hitting percentage on the team,” Smith said. “Her length and her athleticism allows her to touch a lot of balls defensively and allows us to spread out our offense and continue to try running a faster offense, which has been our goal this entire season.”
Setter Jazlyn Maxon was on varsity last season but saw minimal playing time. “She was training under our senior setter and has also been asked to step in to play all the time and all the way around,” Smith said. “She’s one of our captains. Her ability to deliver the ball and get the ball to the hitters has improved a ton since last year. She worked really hard on that over the season. She serves well and plays good defense and has also really improved her leadership skills over last year.”
Julia Pung is a junior libero for the Oilers. “She came into the preseason fighting for an outside hitting position,” Smith said. “[With] her defense and her ability on serve receive to put the ball into [play], we didn’t want to take her out of the back row. She leads the team in digs. She’s in the middle of our serve receive in every rotation. She does a great job of increasing her defensive intensity and her aggressiveness. She’s fast and extremely athletic and is able to catch a lot of balls, that maybe not everybody would be able to. She’s improved her leadership skills.”
Mount Pleasant lost in the district final to Midland Dow last year. “But we had a 40-plus win season and won four tournaments and played in the finals of every tournament we were in last year,” Smith said. “We’re pretty excited. We are hosting our district. We hope to surprise some teams. We played Midland and Midland Dow our first two matches of the conference season. I would like to think that at this point of the season, we’re a different team than we were then. We’ve worked hard to improve our consistency.
“Our goal is to always win our district and move on.”