The accomplishments Virginia women’s volleyball coach Lee Maes and his teams achieved while he was the head assistant coach at Nebraska are numerous and impressive: a national championship, three conference championships and 13 All-Americans.
Now in his first season as the head coach of the Cavaliers, Maes hopes to bring similar accolades to Virginia.
“Our expectation every season is to have the opportunity to compete for the ACC Championship with the goal of also earning an NCAA berth,” Maes said. “We expect to be successful.”
Such goals might seem lofty for a team that finished with an 18-13 record in 2007, but the team already has had a quick start, sweeping the Days Inn JMU Invitational. Virginia has another three-game tournament this weeked at the Denver Pioneer Invitational, where the Cavaliers will take on Denver, Tennessee and Iowa.
The gameplan Maes brings to the Cavaliers focuses on having each player fulfill her role in a system rather than having the team rely on individuals making athletic plays.
The players “have been very receptive and responsive to what we’ve been trying to instill,” Maes said, adding that they “have demonstrated a level of determination to make the learning curve a lot smaller.”
Maes noted that the task of learning the system is a lot to ask of the incoming freshmen, but said they have handled the stress well so far.
Freshman outside hitter Simone Asque was one of the top recruits for the Cavaliers this past season: Asque was ranked No. 79 as a senior in high school by PrepVolleyball.com.
Preparing “has been lots of hard work with lots of hard and intense sessions,” Asque said. “But I think it’s really going to make a difference.”
Asque, along with outside hitter Kelly Rhein and middle hitters Tess Udall and Hillary Trebels, is one of the four incoming freshmen joining the team. The promising class of recruits is a big part of what Maes has described as his hope for where the Cavaliers will be in the next several years.
“The ultimate vision is to have the opportunity to win a national championship,” Maes said. “The future will take care of itself, in a sense, if we focus on what we do now, knowing there’s a positive effect of what we do now.”
The kind of program Maes works to develop is not isolated to earning wins out on the court, however; the Virginia women’s volleyball program is also revising the way it markets the sport and the way it fosters a devoted fan base.
“It’s focused on ... being the best that we can absolutely be,” Maes said. “That goes from how we prepare, that goes with how we recruit, how we administer [games] and how we just run this program in general.”
Among the top priorities the coaches have raised for the rest of this season include developing a distinct, consistent playing style and personality for the team.
“There are a lot of philosophical and conceptual things we would like our team to understand,” Maes said. “As the season goes on, I think we’ll start evolving and creating our own identity.”
The Cavaliers show early signs of developing a team concept: Clean, efficient play has been a point of emphasis in the intense preseason workouts and the decisive tournament victories.
Maes noted that efficiency is a main goal for Virginia this season.
“Ultimately, that’s what we want to be as a team,” Maes said. “That’s what I think fans can see. I think they’re going to see a disciplined group.”
The team, however, is still a work in progress and has a long way to go to reach its goal of winning championships. Nevertheless, this season promises to be an exciting one for the Cavaliers as they attempt to translate their hard work on and off the court in applying their coaches’ philosophies into winning games.
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