Last night The University of South Dakota Volleyball team broke their 13 match losing streak. And we did by letting our passion for the game flow out onto the court, and by taking pride in everything we did last night. I have known for a while that we had the physical talent to have success on the court, but we were lacking a sense of intensity and passion that great teams have. Last night we displayed that from start to finish, and those attributes gave us a mental edge, and I think it also started to help us develop a better sense of mental toughness. A couple of weeks ago when a team really pushed us, we backed down. Last night, we did not. We pushed back…we were a prized fighter who took the fight to our challenger. I told the players that we are looking for tough minded players, so if you want to find yourself out on the court, you better prove to us that you can rise to the challenge, take criticism, show passion, and to bring a tough attitude to the court. The players out there last night showed those intangibles. We still had flaws in our game, and we have things we need to fix, but when you play the game with passion, you can make up for a lot of shortcomings. Some of our greatest clutch performers in sports have had physical flaws, but they had the mental toughness and intestinal fortitude to succeed.
