By River Mitchell
@rivermitchell27
Sustained success is nothing new for the Springfield College men’s volleyball team. While it’s still early in the season, the Pride have looked sharp, losing just one set in their previous three contests including Wednesday night’s four-set win over Eastern Nazarene.
With the win, the Pride improved to 3-1, and remained undefeated inside Blake Arena.
Despite coming away with the victory, head coach Charlie Sullivan still knew that his team could have performed better than they did.
“A win’s a win sometimes and a win’s a loss sometimes. Tonight was a loss,” Sullivan said. “We didn’t do a good job. Things we can control we didn’t control well. We gotta get better.”
Evan Costley has been an impact player for the Pride all season and Wednesday night was no different – dropping 14 kills across the four sets. Costley, a sophomore, is someone that Coach Sullivan has relied on heavily to get them the win today.
“He’s the one out there that probably has the most experience at that position [outside hitter],” Sullivan said. “We needed to rely on him to be the most experienced person in that position.”
Another player for the Pride that Sullivan has a lot of praise for is first-year libero Ricardo Ortiz, who led the team in digs with nine.
“Really impressed with him,” Sullivan said. “He has a really natural touch on the ball which is important for libero. He softens it [and] he controls it well. He, like a lot of our first-year guys, are just learning how to compete at a high level everyday. They’re not demanded or required to do that in highschool.”
Springfield managed to win the first two sets convincingly – 25-19 and 25-13. However in the third frame, Eastern Nazarene squeezed out a 25-21 set win. After trailing 11-8, the Lions called a timeout, and from there they outscored Springfield 17-10 as they kept hopes for a comeback alive for another set.
“We had too many gross errors,” Sullivan said. “We just gave them too many points off our errors.”
The Pride were finally able to clinch the win in the fourth set on a service error from Eastern Nazarene’s Luis Palacio. First-year Sam Levinson has had great production so far for the Pride, and showed it with four kills in the final set, while Costley followed up with three of his own.
The Pride travel north to Nashua, N.H. to take on Rivier on Saturday at 6 p.m. – a program that Sullivan has a lot of respect for, and recognizes the team will need to make some adjustments going into the game.
“Everything we didn’t do well tonight [will need to be improved],” Sullivan said. “It’s a tough place to play, tough environment, good team, good program [and] they got a lot of good cohesion [and] culture. So it’s going to be a big challenge.”