The Wildcats took to the road on Saturday, March 23 for their first tournament of the spring volleyball season to finish with a solid three split matches and one victory match over host, Eastern Michigan University.

Junior middle hitter Sarah Hamilton said the team started off well.

“We had a good first spring tournament,” Hamilton said. “We came out and played well. In practice now we’ve been working on defense finding our spots and closing the gaps.”

Due to time limits, the women did not get a chance to play the traditional three sets that make up a match against all of the teams in the tournament. The women’s volleyball team played Oakland in two sets to split 1-1. The ’Cats followed with a match against Madonna to split 1-1 in two sets.

Head coach Dominic Yoder said the team did a great job overall, continuing what they had been working on in the Fall 2012 season.

“We had a good opening weekend,” Yoder said. “We played very well at times offensively and blocking. Our floor defense is still progressing.”

Following the first two matches, NMU faced the Eastern Michigan Alumni team to split the match 1-1, as time only allowed for two sets to be played.

Yoder said the team came together well as a group throughout the tournament, something that the girls have been solid with over the past seasons.

“They have always done an excellent job of working together as a team, being one of the best groups I have ever had,” Yoder said. “As a team they are very strong, we just lack a couple individual consistent performances that we are working on to improve.”

The team was able to play a full three-set match against host Eastern Michigan, which resulted in a win for the Wildcats. Northern Michigan took the 2-1 game advantage over EMU in the match.

The team was not able to get statistics for the weekend tournament games, but the Wildcats went 5-4 overall on Saturday.

The ’Cats move forward to play in a weekend tournament hosted by Oakland on Saturday, March 30 in Rochester, Mich.

Yoder said the team has its focus on some goals and priorities for the upcoming tournament games, particularly on the defensive end.

“[We want to work on] better team and individual floor defense and more consistent attacking across our front line and overall complete team performance from beginning of sets until end,” Yoder said.

The upcoming tournament games will hold some Division I teams that Yoder and assistant coach Inga Kurgonaite said they expect to find competitive. Yoder said he expects the team to find a challenge in Saturday’s tournament at Oakland University, where there will be some very strong teams.

Freshman middle hitter Alexis Nelson said the team has been working hard in practice to continue to improve in upcoming tournaments.

“Overall, we stuck together as a team to carry over from where we were in the fall,” Nelson said. “We’re working on things we need to fix for this weekend, like communicating.”