Volleyball settles into final week

The Eastern volleyball team will look to settle into a rhythm for the final week of the regular season.

The final stretch begins tonight at Lantz Arena against non-conference foe Western Illinois. The Westerwinds (4-15, 4-6 in the Mid-Continent Conference) have won two of their last five matches, the latest coming Saturday with a 3-0 win over Oakland.

Western will run a 6-2 offense with juniors Brenna Harper and Erin Walker shifting throughout the match at setter.

The Westerwinds also have a pair of strong hitters. Seniors Sallie Bowles and Amber King provide most of Western’s offense. King, a middle blocker, leads the team with 2.94 kills per game, while Bowles, an outside hitter, has 2.36 kills per game. King also leads the team in blocking with .98 blocks per game.

“They can hit the ball very hard on the outside,” Panther head coach Brenda Winkeler said.

“But they’ve only got a couple of players that we can try to stop instead of having four or five, which is what we’ve seen from some teams recently.”

Western will thrive on a strong blocking attack. The Westerwinds out-blocked Oakland by a sizeable margin and had 11 blocks in their latest win. Eastern (16-7, 10-3 in OVC) will look to stop Western from doing the same thing.

“We’re looking to get back on track,” Winkeler said. “We’re looking for a balanced offense again; this team does the best when we have that. We want to dig as many balls as we can. That really can’t hurt us.”

The Panthers play host to Tennessee Tech (6-15, 2-12) on Friday, Tennessee State (4-19, 0-13) on Saturday and Austin Peay State (14-10, 7-6) on Sunday for their final three matches of the season. Eastern is one match behind first-place Tennessee-Martin in the conference standings.

If the Panthers win out the rest of their matches and Tennessee-Martin loses one match, the Skyhawks win by tiebreaker – head-to-head competition. Martin won in three games at Lantz Arena in October, but lost to the Panthers in five earlier in the season.

The Skyhawks (22-7, 12-2) have Austin Peay and Tennessee State left on their schedule.

If the Panthers win all of their conference matches this week, they clinch second place in the conference, which gives them the No. 2 seed in the league tourney.

“You have to look at things in a positive aspect,” Winkeler said.

“The No. 1 seed isn’t always a good thing – you might come into the tournament with too high of hopes. Besides, the No. 2 seed still gets a bye.”