After beating Tennessee Tech on Wednesday and claiming the OVC regular season co-champion title and rights to host the tournament, Eastern volleyball will host the OVC Championships at Gardella Family Court at McAfee Gym.
The Panthers aren’t strangers to hosting, as it was something they did in 2023. Eastern won the championships that year. However, it was under the old coaching staff and with only five players on the current team.
And it was hosted in their old home, Groninger Arena.
Now, it will be hosted in their brand new arena. A place they are undefeated in, going 9-0 at home this season.
“It’s just such a huge advantage to be able to play this tournament in McAfee,” head coach Ryan Millar said. “Aside from the part that being able to host the conference tournament year one, new gym, new coaching staff, that’s all cool, but just for our ability to recognize and bring the type of energy that we normally do in McAfee. Up to this point, we’ve been pretty successful in there.”
Their first match is against Lindenwood, whom EIU swept at the end of September in their first OVC series.
However, Millar said Lindenwood has made some adjustments throughout the season.
“They’ve had an interesting year where they’ve changed a lot of position players and moved a lot of pieces around,” Millar said. “So it’s actually kind of hard to scout them a little bit, just because they’ve been trying to do so many different things. In fact, the last match they played against Little Rock, they made another major change that they hadn’t done all year.”
So EIU is going to prepare as much as they can with the mentality that the Job’s not done.
“Nobody’s kind of coming in to this weekend and next week thinking that we’ve already accomplished what we’re set out to accomplish,” Millar said. “We still have work to do.”
Their match will start at 4 p.m. tomorrow, with the winning team playing the winner of SEMO and Little Rock at 6 p.m. on Monday. And the loser’s season will be over.
“If you don’t finish the job on night one, you’re not going to get to night two. And if you don’t finish the job at night two, you’re not going to get to night three,” Millar said. “So that’s a pretty simple message that I think will reiterate at practice [Friday]”
The winner of that match will head to the championship to play the team left standing out of Morehead State, SIUE, Southern Indiana and Tennessee Tech.
The winner of the championship will have an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.
Eastern has the most All-OVC players with five.
Sophomore outside hitters Katie Kopshever and Destiny Walker made the first team. Also getting those honors is senior setter Catalina Rochaix, who was named OVC Setter of the Year for the second time in her career.
The two players named to the second team were senior outside hitter Lilli Amettis and sophomore libero Ariadna Pereles.
EIU also brought home the Coach of the Year award, with it going to Millar.
Bryce Parker can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].
