Women's Volleyball: Defending champs visit Dillon

The end of this week will mark the beginning of the Ivy League season for the women’s volleyball team, which will host defending conference champion Penn in Dillon Gymnasium on Friday night.

The Tigers (7-5) come into the league season with high expectations and a chip on their shoulders after last year’s promising season ground to a halt with four disappointing losses in their final four games.

Princeton welcomed five talented players from the Class of 2015 into the fold in addition to retaining the core of last year’s squad. Senior middle blocker Cathryn Quinn, senior libero Hillary Ford and junior outside hitter Lydia Rudnick — the Tigers’ All-Ivy selections last year — are all returning to a team that hopes to contend for the league title. Rudnick missed several early games this year with an injury but has since worked her way back into the regular lineup.

In addition to those three, junior opposite Jennifer Palmquist and senior setter Michaela Venuti came into the season entrenched in their starting spots. The lineup has been shaken up early on, however, with some of the strongest performers thus far including freshman opposite Sarah Hanna and freshman setter Ginny Willis, who has largely supplanted Venuti.

The start of the Ivy League season will also mark a beginning for first-year head coach Sabrina King ’01. King, who was hired to replace Jolie Ward following her transfer to New York University at the end of last season, has a long and storied history at Princeton.

The 1999 Ivy League Player of the Year, King led the Tigers to championships in three of her four seasons in orange and black, after which she returned as an assistant coach under Glenn Nelson. So far, the team seems to be faring well under her leadership, with a better record leading into the Ivy League season than it had last season — particularly impressive considering that the team’s star Rudnick was absent in seven of the team’s 12 games.

The Tigers showed a propensity for playing and winning long five-setters early in last season, especially at the outset of the league schedule. They took five straight matches in the Ivy League to start the last season, of which three went the distance and only one ended in a three-set sweep.

However, the long hours eventually seemed to catch up to them, as the Tigers faltered toward the back end and only won three of their last nine matches. Princeton will have to be quicker from the beginning in games this season if it hopes to avoid expending too much energy early in the season.

The Tigers will also need to make better use of their backups to keep their starting lineup relatively fresh for late-game situations toward the end of the season. King’s tinkering with the lineup combined with Rudnick’s temporary absence this preseason gave multiple players, especially freshmen, a chance to have a major impact on games, which should help enlarge the team’s rotation.

Princeton’s chief rivals have shown few signs of vulnerability so far this season. While Penn has been relatively slow out of the gate at 4-5, both Yale and Columbia have overall winning records entering conference play.

Columbia especially was a thorn in the Tigers’ side last season. The Lions were the first team in the Ivy League to take a match from Princeton and the only team to beat the Tigers twice. Columbia opens conference play against Cornell on Saturday and plays Princeton in two weeks.

With some tough memories from last season and a core of players hungry to improve under a new coach, however, this season could be very promising for Princeton.