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New coaches stressing fitness, technique
Not all surprises fill their recipients with wonder and pleasure.
Surprises at Liberty volleyball practice, for example, can cause muscle burn and shortness of breath. In fact, punishment seems more apt a term for the sit-ups, wall-squats and block-jumps doled out by new co-coaches Theresa Gore and Kevin Mozingo.
Specific goals are set for most drills at practice and, "If they don’t get there, they get a surprise," Gore said.
Those little extra workouts have been welcomed, though.
“We’ve been having some good feedback from them," Mozingo said after a practice last Friday. "They’ve been saying this has been the hardest practices that they’ve had in volleyball at this school."
The taxing practices are part of an effort to help Liberty improve on its 7-14 record last season, 3-11 in the Cedar Run District. That won’t be easily accomplished, though. Along with losing last season’s coach, Tom Ritchie, the Eagles lost seven seniors to graduation, including stars Mary Marks, Christy Ritchie and Catherine Winslow.
Gore, 50, and Mozingo, 38, only watched that group of Eagles from the opponents' side of the net last season when they were coaches for the Culpeper County High volleyball team, so they’re unsure how much graduation actually hurt Liberty. And ignorance is bliss, they say.
“I guess that’s the beauty of coming in here and not knowing a whole lot about the program — we don’t know what we lost so we don’t see it as a loss,” Gore said. “And coming from a program with less experience, we see this as a gain.”
Culpeper won just two matches with Gore as head coach last season, going winless in the Cedar Run District and finishing last. Liberty didn’t fare much better, finishing seventh in the eight-team district, so Gore and Mozingo, a former JV coach at Culpeper, have their work cut out for them in Bealeton.
It’s already been a challenging transition, albeit for an encouraging reason. The co-coaches had grown accustomed to teaching basic skills to players who entered high school without having had the benefit of any middle school volleyball program in the Culpeper school district...See the Wednesday print edition of the Fauquier Times-Democrat for the complete story.
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