Cerritos College Women’s Volleyball practice for the season with a six weeks of summer class. The Volleyball team met four times a week for training. It was a bulk of their preseason training before their first match.

According to head Coach Kari Hemmerling, “for this scrimmage, we learned a lot about our team.”

We’ve been doing a lot of six on six and practice.

But when you play against other teams, they kind of expose you on things that you know, your team’s obviously not familiar with, because you’re seeing different systems and whatnot.

So my expectation was just to get a lot of good touches, and see kind of how they think on their feet and different circumstances.

So I didn’t, there was no score or anything like that. So it was just really to see kind of how they bounce back.

You know, when when, you know, maybe they had blocked a few times are they going to tank are they going to keeps being aggressive kind of thing.

(what improvements does the team need)

Well, right now we have we need a lot of improvement.

It’s just but it’s all the small things. Just attention to detail.

Being mindful, every every touch every time they’re out there playing ball, not just can’t take plays off have to be engaged the whole time.

So I think, improvements, I think we have the skills, it’s just going to be mentally can they stay focused from one to 25, you know, had three times in a row. So

(what is your strategy for the season?)

My strategy is very vague. And let’s see, I’d say my biggest thing is just I like to train the girls to be volleyball players, I don’t just teach them one position.

And so if there’s only two outside hitter, play, play, but if there’s three outside hitters, and they’re my three best players, I’m going to find a way to get them on the court.

So my kind of my strategy is to have my six best athletes on the court at all times.

So maybe they’re playing a new position and doing something a little bit different.

But my strategy is to make sure that the six that have been shown up and working the hardest and doing everything right.

Those are going to be the ones that are on the court the majority of the time.

(How many returners you have coming back this year)

So we have about it’s about seven returners and I think eight freshmen or transfers.

That’s right, about half of the squats. We have 15 totals right now. So you have a fresh so we’re on some of the ones that are listed as freshmen they joined in the spring last year, they were students already but they weren’t playing.

So they’re familiar with what we do. So it’s it’s nice because we have two years with them still and then got an extra semester of training.

(Who are some of our top players?)

Alexia Torres, she played middle for us last year, but she just a really good Volleyball player and middles that roles limited, kind of right.

Like it has to be a perfect pass for a goal set them when you want. But she’s a really good volleyball player, she can pass, she can play defense and she can hit a high ball. So we put on the outside this year, and she’s doing a really nice job.

Mirka is going to be our center. Mirka Grenoble. And so they played together and club in high school. So they have a pretty good connection.