2019 Whiteoak Lady Wildcats Volleyball Preview
WHITEOAK LADY WILDCATS
Head Coach: Katie Pollard
2018 SHAC Record: 4-9
2018 Overall Record: 9-14
Whiteoak head coach Katie Pollard says working on the mental game of her team is one of the top goals for the program this upcoming season, and if that improves, everything else will be better as well with the Lady ’Cats set to start the upcoming season.
WHS is coming off a season where they totaled nine wins and had 14 losses to their credit, and they finished 4-9 in their conference games. Now entering a new season, the Lady Wildcats will have nine players at the varsity level as they work to improve on their win totals from a season ago.
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Seniors this season for the Lady ’Cats are Destiny Price, Cylee Bratton and Kiley Hamilton. The juniors are Jeanette Cox, Alex Greene, Sydney Scott and Allie Kiley. The two sophomores are Ann Ames and Brooklyn Gross.
Hamilton in ’18 totaled 117 digs, 187 serve receptions and had 13 kills. Bratton finished last season with 27 kills, 170 digs and 67 aces.
“Cylee Bratton was voted by her peers to be our captain this year, and she is one of our top players. She is such a good mental ball player, very smart, sometimes gets too cautious and I’m trying to get that aggressiveness out of her to do that,” Pollard said. “Kiley Hamilton has really grown over the four years I’ve had her, and she runs the back row awesome when she’s back there, and I’ve added her to the front row. She’s playing all rotations this year. Kiley has a heck of a right side hit, and she’s going to be serving and she’s never served for us before.
“Alex Greene is our setter this year, and the past two years she’s been our setter in JV. I’ve had officials come to me after games and say ‘your JV setter is very good,’ and I was like ‘I can’t wait to get her to varsity.’ She almost lost her spot this year, but I told her what she needed to work on, and she did and is doing great now.”
Pollard also spoke about one of the juniors who stepped up as a sophomore a season ago, along with one of her teammates as well.
“Jeanette played a good deal for us last year due to injuries. She has just stepped right back up into that middle position, and I’m really looking for her to get some big hits and her blocking,” Pollard said. “She won the overall block shot of our team last year as a sophomore. Allie has worked on her game as an outside hitter, and you can see she wants it.”
Last season, Cox totaled 101 kills, 44 solo blocks and had four aces.
There is improvement that needs to be made with the program, and part of that is the mental game of the Lady ‘Cats as Coach Pollard said that is a main focus this season.
“Our mental game is top on our goal list and keeping it because volleyball is such a mental game. These girls are really good about shaking things off. I tell them everyone is going to make a mistake,” Pollard said. “Our mental expectations are really good this year, and honestly we have the skills on the court too.
“If you come to our practices, you see everything we do, and if we just apply that to our games, there’s no question about it. I think applying it to our games comes from our mental game. If we can just keep our mentality up, our game time up, they will do a good job.”
Improvement on hitting is another aspect of the Whiteoak volleyball team that needs to be better if they want to be competitive in ’19.
“We need to improve on our hitting. Our serving and our serve receiving were really strong, but we have to hit the ball hard,” Pollard said. “We’ve worked on that, and in a recent practice we did that for 45 minutes. We need front row, back row, at every position, everybody hitting from everywhere.
“This group of girls have worked really hard the past couple weeks we’ve all been together. They are having fun, and they are out there to enjoy it and it is benefiting them.”