Sports

UH volleyball comes home after extended road trip

After traveling the country for more than a month, the Cougars finally come home to the friendly confines of the Athletics/Alumni Center this weekend.

UH hosts Tulane today and UTEP on Saturday, and won’t travel again until Oct. 16, when the team will head to Hattiesburg, Miss. to take on Southern Miss.

The Cougars entered Conference-USA play last weekend with a 3-12 record and split their first two matches with UAB (8-9) and Memphis (2-14), respectively, to improve to 4-13.’

The team found a bit of mental fortitude in their victory over Memphis, accomplishing something they hadn’t done all season. Going into the fourth set, the Cougars were leading 2-1. They trailed the Tigers 24-25 before converting four kills to win the set 28-26, and the match, 3-1.’

‘Earlier in the year, in that same situation, we’d have made four errors,’ head coach Bill Walton said. ‘So that was one of the first times where we were errorless, from the time the score got tied, from then on, we made no errors, and that’s how you win.’

Walton said it’s difficult to tell whether the Cougars’ comeback was an aberration, or a sign of maturity.

‘We’ll know in the future,’ Walton said. ‘When you’re young, you don’t know if it’s going to be what happens all the time, or if we’re still just being inconsistent. Maybe that’s a sign we’re improving.’

Walton said if the Cougars are going to build off that victory, they must improve their offense.

‘Our offense is not playing good enough. We need more kills per game still,’ Walton said. ‘We had two games this weekend where we’ve had 18 and 16 (kills), which is the kind of numbers we are looking for, but up until conference play, we’ve been averaging about 11 kills per game. We need to be averaging around 14 or 15. If we can do that we’ll be in pretty good shape.’

The Cougars continue conference play at home against Tulane (7-4) at 7 p.m. today and UTEP (9-7) at 7 p.m. Saturday. Walton knows that conference matches always provide their own challenges and this weekend’s slate is no different.

‘UTEP has like five seniors, so they’re going to be difficult,’ Walton said. ‘Tulane has been, successful this year with what they’re doing.’

Walton hopes that the Cougars will take advantage of playing at home.

‘I’m hoping that coming home gives us some new inspiration, after being on the road,’ Walton said. ‘When you come home, you’re usually about 10-20 percent better …’ we’ll be in every game again. Plus, when we’ll be in it at the end, at crunch time, hopefully that home court advantage will give us confidence that we didn’t have this past weekend.’

‘If we can get two weekends under our belt, where we’re good at the end of the game, hopefully we’ll be off and running for the rest of the year.’

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