After failing to win the Southern Division title last season for the first time since the MEAC went to a two-division alignment nine years ago, the Florida A&M volleyball team is showing signs of returning to its dominant ways.
The Lady Rattlers reached the halfway point of their 10-match divisional schedule with a perfect 5-0 record. Even though each of their five victories was by a 3-0 score, and their 9-11 overall gives them one more victory than their season total for all of last year when they were 8-21. FAMU head coach Tony Trifonov says not so fast when the conversation goes in the direction of the Lady Rattlers being a resurgent team.
“I wouldn’t call it a resurgent season,” Trifonov said. “We’re 9-11. A resurgent season would be 25-2. It’s a rebuilding year. We have a lot of young players. We have a lot of work to do before we can call it resurgent.’’
The Lady Rattlers’ 12-player roster includes six freshmen. However, last season Florida A&M was hampered by injuries to key players (Ginna Chavez-Lopez and Pamela Soriano), while arch-rival Bethune-Cookman supplanted the Lady Rattlers as the top team in the Southern Division. In fact, the three conference losses last year were the most FAMU had suffered in a season in Trifonov’s tenue.
“It happens,’’ Trifonov said of the Lady Rattlers 2015 down season. “You can’t win everything every year. We’ve been fortunate to win quite a few in a row. You can’t always be on top.”
Soriano underwent off-season shoulder surgery and has yet to see action. But her absence hasn’t hampered the Lady Rattlers, who have a six-match winning streak after beating Troy University, 3-1, last week.
Chavez-Lopez has returned this season and leads the conference in hitting percentage (.311). She has gotten plenty of support from her teammates. This week Valeria Lopez was named MEAC Co-Setter of Week and freshman Maria Yvette Garcia, a member of the Dominican Republic Under 23 team that won the bronze medal at the 2015 World Championships, was named MEAC Co-Player of the Week for the second consecutive week. Nicole Abreu was named Rookie of the Week last week.
Those are encouraging signs for Trifonov, who says the rebuilding effort is on pace with what he hoped for before the season began. However, he cautions, “there are always things you need to work on. It’s a start.’’
With six freshmen on the squad, Trifonov says experience, chemistry and adapting to the college game are areas of concern for the Lady Rattlers going forward.
“We are far from where we want to be,’’ he said.
Trifonov hopes that a challenging non-conference schedule will help the younger team members make the adjustment to competing at the collegiate level and gain valuable experience. The Lady Rattlers won a set against the University of Georgia, which was picked to finish as high as fourth in the SEC in some preseason polls, and they had strong showing in a 3-0 loss to 16th-ranked Florida State.
Florida A&M has dominated the MEAC for most of Trifonov’s 18 seasons as coach. In addition to winning the Southern Division title for 14 straight seasons (2001-14), the Lady Rattlers have won 10 tournament championships, the last coming in 2009. They lost last season to Howard in the 2015 MEAC Tournament semifinals.
Trifonov is downplaying the Lady Rattlers’ chances returning to the top of the MEAC heap this season. With his youthful roster in mind, he is looking to the future.
“We just need to get better,’’ he said. “We don’t want to look forward to the end of the season. We still have five or six until the conference tournament. Our goal is just to get better every match and be more consistent. If we are more consistent at the end of the season and we have improved from where we started, that would be a successful season. We’re not thinking in terms of championships at this point. Our goal coming into the season was to get better with every practice and every match that we play. We’re a very young team and hopefully the majority of them will be together for a very long time.’’