This weekend, the Wichita State volleyball program was supposed to be in Nacoghodes, Texas playing Stephen F. Austin. Instead, they played their first game of the season in the form of a Black and Yellow Scrimmage on Saturday. 

For WSU, they were able to host a scrimmage at Charles Koch Arena while also allowing 2,000 fans to attend. In their first action of the year, Head Coach Chris Lamb felt they weren’t ready in terms of lineups because of the greater focus on training to this point.

“We’ve just been using the time to train a lot of really talented young people and try to get them up to speed,” Lamb said. “We haven’t really focused on who next to who, what may be the best 6-7 playing together in terms of turning in a lineup because we haven’t had to.” 

With the American Athletic Conference postponing the season until the spring and the possibility of the program having to shut down during this semester, Lamb said he might try to focus more on lineups now if they stay in those 20-hour segments.  

On this year’s roster, WSU features ten total newcomers with nine of those being freshmen. Unlike most fall sports, volleyball doesn’t do any training in summer which has been good for the newcomers in terms of training. 

“If this thing had to happen any of the 20 years I’ve been here, this really is the year I would’ve picked,” Lamb said. “Because of things from a recruiting standpoint, having a lot of really young players because if anything they have talent on their side so they have more time to develop skill and experience.”

For Lamb, he feels that this scrimmage can have a great impact on the team as they are graded on things and can allow the coaching staff to work with the players on things they can work on in practice. 

“If you train, the most valid thing you can do is play because that’s the test,” Lamb said. “We’re not being graded on how well we do a particular skill or drill, we have to get out there and function as a group. There’s just chaotic things that happen in our sport that you need to have reps and chances to see it, evaluate it, teach it, train it, coach them up.”

Lamb also feels that this experience can be priceless for the team as a whole. Although they can train as much as possible, it’s a different atmosphere playing in front of a live crowd. 

“It really is priceless and on one hand I can say, I know we’re getting that same type of activity in a practice but I think it’s different in the brain when several hundred people are watching you and the lights are on and you’ve got to get comfortable with that too,” Lamb said. “You can’t let that be any type of a distraction. I’ll take as many of these as we can roll out.”

Lamb said that he is hopeful that they will be able to have some more scrimmages in the future. Overall, he felt that the energy was at times flat especially since the PA was out due to being in quarantine. 

But Lamb feels if they’re able to host another scrimmage, they can make it better as time goes on. 

“I’m going to push for it on Saturday and we’ll talk it over as a staff,” Lamb said. “If Wichita State wants to allow us to keep doing it, I think it’s good for us and we’ll just get better at it as we move forward.”