Developing club sports strive to meet goals and establish themselves. For the newly founded men’s club volleyball team, one of those goals will be met this weekend when the team hosts its first home tournament since the early 1990’s, according to Adison Musser, the club’s vice-president and junior in biochemistry.
“We’re all really excited and real pumped,” Musser said. “It’s the first time in like 10 years that we’ve had a tournament for men here.”
The club was re-established two years ago and has met mixed responses because of the sport’s association with women, according to club president and senior in textile engineering Davis Litzenberger.
“Men’s volleyball is kind of unknown in the region,” Litzenberger said. “Everyone generally thinks volleyball is a girl’s sport around here. Not until you get up north to New York and out west to California is men’s volleyball big.”
Despite the sport’s relative lack of exposure among men, the club flourished last season and has continued to improve this season, leading up to the upcoming Wolfpack Invitational.
“We played a similar tournament two weeks ago and lost in the semifinals,” Will Pluer, a senior in environmental engineering, said. “We should have won. We actually beat the team that won. So with home court advantage, there’s no excuse for us to lose.”
But the success hasn’t come easy, according to Musser.
“We’ve brought a few people in to run our practice for us,” Musser said. “It’s hard, being a student-run program, to be a student coach. It’s difficult for me to participate in the practice when I have to run it. So the past few of weeks we’ve had some people come in to help us run it and get the chemistry of our team together for this tournament.”
And in addition to on-court performance, the club has also had to worry about the organizational issues associated with putting on a tournament.
“Going into it, I was thinking I’d just call up a bunch of teams and be like, ‘Hey, let’s meet at Carmichael and play volleyball,'” Litzenberger said. “But it took an incredible amount of organizational time and effort and energy. We’ve been planning this since mid-May.”
Pluer said the club has also had to earn its funds to put on an event of this kind.
“Every other club has events that they’re running, and [Student Government is] trying to divvy [money] up between so many different people,” Pluer said. “[Fundraising] has been terribly difficult.”
The tournament will feature 12 teams, including UNC and Duke.
“Getting a whole team to come and organizing other teams to get here is crazy,” Litzenberger said. “This week alone we’ve had two different teams drop and three more teams ask if they want to come.”
The tournament will take place Saturday, with pool play running from 9:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and playoffs running from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. All matches will be played in Carmichael Gym on courts 3-5.
And Musser has some big predictions for the tournament.
“We’re going to for sure make it to the finals,” Musser said. “We’ve done well in all of our previous tournaments. We’ve finished no lower than third so I think we have a good change of winning on our home turf.”