Canada’s women’s volleyball team drops opener to US at Olympic qualifier

Husker volleyball fans used to a full house had a different experience as there were somewhere around 5,000 fans in house, but it felt like a home match at Devaney when Kelsey Robinson, Jordan Larson-Burbach, and Kayla Banwarth were announced as starters. Tori Dixon punched in seven points.

Lucille Charuk guided Canada with nine points while Tabitha Love contributed eight. Canada held a 7-3 margin in blocks, while the Americans had a 2-0 edge in aces.

“Just to support United States of America volleyball and some of the ex husker players, so we’re coming all three nights it’ll be fun”, Jason and Lidia Reinke said.

In Friday night’s lineup for the round-robin event, the USA takes on No. 15 Puerto Rico, a four-set loser in Thursday’s opening match to the seventh-ranked Dominican Republic – 17-25, 25-13, 25-23, 25-23.

The three-day, round-robin NORCECA Olympic Qualification Tournament began Thursday.

Karch Kiraly, the Team USA coach said that Lincoln is one of the hottest volleyball spots on the country. “It’s the first time we have played a qualifier at home, which is definitely an advantage, even though this is a gym with which we are not familiar”, said Winters, by phone from Edmonton. We also brought Megan Easy in as she has had a good training camp, particularly good at the net hitting and blocking. It is a family, so it’s refreshing in every sense that we can think of and there’s an excitement and an urgency to come play together and fight together, and get the job done. We talked about throwing a lot of good a them.

“Connor Sport Court has been a valued partner of USA Volleyball for over 25 years and we are proud to showcase their outstanding volleyball surface at this prestigious event where our U.S. Women’s National Team is competing to earn its qualification to the 2016 Rio Olympic Games”, said USA Volleyball Secretary General Kerry Klostermann. Our serving wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. “We won Pan Am Cup, we won Grand Prix, we won Pan Am Games with a split team, simultaneous tournaments, we won NORCECA and we had two losses in the World Cup”. “This has actually turned out to be a blessing to get the opportunity to be with one another again, to keep working on where we left off. It seems as though everyone came back very grateful and appreciative of getting another opportunity to be with one another, and we’ve been really going hard in the gym”.

After the World Cup miss in late August into early September, the US players have largely been away from each other with their club teams overseas.

Fans at the arena say they’re excited to see big events like this in Lincoln. “They’re all teams that match up pretty well with us”.

To put that in perspective for this year’s roster, which averages 29½ years of age, six Summer Olympics ago they would have been just five years old, and that includes veteran libero Daniel Lewis, who was born the first year Team Canada reached the Olympics in 1976. There were moments where we beat ourselves and that’s what hurt us.