bleedCrimson.net Weekly Coach Jordan Interview

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach Jordan about last week's matches against Utah State and San Jose State, the WAC tournament and what he thinks has been the biggest improvement during this season.

bleedCrimson.net: Against Utah State you mentioned last week that you were looking for the team to come out better than they had in the previous three matches and after getting down 3-0 in the first set it was lights out.
Mike Jordan: Yeah. Definitely one of our better attacking matches. We passed pretty well and really did a nice job offensively. Limited our errors. I think we had nine errors for the whole match. That's unheard of for us. Typically we can be anwhere from 28 to... I don't know what our average errors per game is but to keep it to three per game, we're pretty happy with that kind of performance this late in the season.

bc.net: You had three players that hit over .850, Lindsey who hit. 522 and Amber who hit .643.
MJ: We ball handled so well and so we were in system a lot and our setters did a great job of locating the ball which helps.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked with Coach Jordan about last week's matches against Nevada and Fresno State, Amber Simpson and the two regular season ending matches against Utah State and San Jose State.

bleedCrimson.net: Your thoughts on the Nevada match.
Mike Jordan: Obviously you can't make the amount of attack errors we made and expect to win games, especially on the road. I think after game one we had 12 attack errors. Fortunately between games two and three we settled down and got our head on straight and started executing better in game three. The first game against Fresno State was kind of the same thing. I'm not sure why we're starting so slowly but that needs to stop happening.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week Coach Jordan discussed last week's sweeps and looked ahead to this week's road trip.

bleedCrimson.net: Last week you picked up a sweep against La. Tech at home, Kelsey Brennan got some good playing time in the second set and picked up six kills in seven attempts.
Mike Jordan:: She's improving, she's still got a long ways to go but she's athletic and has a great arm. She's still trying to catch up with the speed of the college game. We think she's gonna be a really good player eventually.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week Coach Jordan was out and so we talked with assistant coach Stevi Adams about the sweep over UTEP and Louisiana Tech, Alyssa Gintant, and looked ahead to this week's matches against Louisiana Tech and Boise State.

bleedCrimson.net: The UTEP match, there was a good crowd, a good atmosphere and the team handled the atmosphere very well and came away with sweep.
Stevi Adams: It's not really hard getting jazzed up for UTEP. We understand it's a big rivalry match for us. We actually have a large amount of the crowd in our favor which really helps. The crowd and the community really get involved and we really get hyped up for that and we came out and got a three game sweep which is what we always love. We played pretty well and got some other people in who don't usually get in as much as we like and they all produced for us. Overall I think we did a great job.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week Coach Jordan was out sick so we talked with assistant head coach Ashley Hardee about the sweep over the Idaho schools, Kelli Goodan and Erin Birmingham's play and looked ahead to this week's matches against UTEP and Louisiana Tech.

bleedCrimson.net: Against Idaho the team really seemed to come out focused for the match and the performance was probably even more dominating than the victory over them up in Moscow.
Ashley Hardee: Yeah we really did. You play at Hawai'i and you win there and automatically you come back and were talking about not having a letdown. We knew Idaho was a good team. They were third in the league at the time and they played us really tough up there. Even though it was only three games it was three tough close games. But we came out here we played really well we were really focused the whole time. It was a nice performance.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked about the sweep against #6 Hawai'i, Amber Simpson and Erin Birmingham's play in the match and the upcoming matches against Idaho and Boise State.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk about the victory over Hawai'i, what were you most pleased with?
Mike Jordan: We've just been talking about playing the game more aggressively at the service line, defensively, in particular when things are going bad. Try not to get too frustrated or down on ourselves and stay aggressive. I thought we did a really good job of that and that was one of the big reasons we won.

bc.net: What did you tell your kids during the timeout in the second set after you'd gone down 8-1?
MJ: I think I reminded them of that and we just talked about that we weren't going to get all the points back at once. You're down 8-1, you've just gotta chip away at it. I told them that the goal would be to be tied back up at 18 or 20 and just tried to keep them composed as best I could.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked about the road sweep against San Jose State and Utah State, Lindsey Yon's Player of the Week honor, Erin Birmingham's play and the big rematch against #6 Hawai'i.

bleedCrimson.net: You picked up a pair of sweeps against San Jose State and Utah State last week, talk about the two matches.
Mike Jordan: I thought we did a good job defensively. Against Utah State for sure. San Jose, we struggled at the beginning of games two and three with a little serve receive issue. Other than that I thought we played really good volleyball. We did a really good job of holding them to low hitting percentages. And passing the ball, other than the beginning of games two and three I thought we did a good job there. I thought our setters did a really good job in particular the whole weekend.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked about the matches against Idaho and Hawai'i, the road trip to San Jose and Logan and the Krista Altermatt's outstanding play.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about your match against Idaho, it was one of the more dominating performances of the season.
Mike Jordan: Well, we played well. We passed the ball real well. I think Idaho's one of the tougher places to play on the road. Any time you can go get a convincing road win you feel pretty good about it. We had pretty good performances all around and competed very well.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked about the matches against Fresno State and Nevada, the road trip to Moscow to face a good Idaho team and the big showdown with Hawai'i in the Pan Am.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the Fresno State match.
Mike Jordan: Well, we're definitely more athletic than they and the homr court advantage and the fact that we played a really tough schedule I think we're just a little bit more ahead of the game than they are. They relaxed and played a little bit better as the match went on which was good. We finally got a little bit of competition against them in game three. We attacked the ball real well on the right which is great. Both our rights did a good job. That was nice for us to see, we needed that confidence builder.

bc.net: You also got a big night from Lindsey and Krista as well.
MJ: Yeah, they're both capable of putting up big number and they do a good job for us. They took advantage of some mismatches and really did a good job.

bleedCrimson.net will be conducting weekly interviews with Aggie head volleyball coach Mike Jordan during the 2008 season. This week we talked about the matches against Stanford, Santa Clara and UC-Santa Barbara, beginning league play against Fresno State and Nevada and the possible re-emergence of the WAC as a volleyball power conference.

bleedCrimson.net: Talk a little bit about the Stanford match.
Mike Jordan: I thought we played well in stretches for sure. We did a lot of good things. We passed well, we defended well. We've done pretty well at keeping teams below their season hitting percentages and Stanford was no exception. We just didn't attack the ball well enough particularly on the right. That kind of led to our downfall, that and Stanford's got a lot of talent.

bc.net: The first set there were nine service errors between the two teams but the Aggies' errors kept the team from going on any point runs. The first three points you won were followed up with a service error.
MJ: Yeah that was a little frustrating. But overall our ace to service ratio has been pretty good. Against great teams like that you've gotta serve tough so I don't mind the occasional miss if we're really getting after it at the line. The mishit serves and that kind of thing is frustrating. But that really isn't the reason we lost that set.