With the regular season concluding for Southern Miss beach volleyball, their eyes turn to the Sun Belt Championship Tournament.
Southern Miss Beach Volleyball played their final regular season games in Elmwood, La., this past weekend.
Looking ahead, senior Zuzanna Michalska shared her mentality going into the tournament.
“I’m definitely excited,” said Michalska. “I’m trying to not make it a very big deal in my head, like it’s just supposed to be like every other tournament.”
Junior Laurel Dennis shared that the familiarity of the courts will help the Golden Eagles succeed in the tournament.
“We’ve played there twice this past year,” said Dennis. “And so, we kind of have a better idea of what the layout is, how the facility is set up, the depth of the sand, height of the nets, you know, some stuff like that.”
Southern Miss’s final regular season games took place in the NOLA Classic. Friday’s first match against Florida International ended with a narrow 3-2 Southern Miss loss. The Golden Eagles got back in the win column with a commanding 5-0 victory against University of New Orleans. Saturday started off with another commanding 4-1 win for the Golden Eagles, this time against University of Louisiana-Monroe. But in their final regular season game, Southern Miss lost 3-2 against Tulane.
Freshman Margarita Grigoreva won all four of her duos sets in the NOLA Classic. She won three with Jaden White and one with Ryann Thomas. Dennis and junior Sadie McAda also won three of their four doubles sets.
With their win against ULM, Southern Miss pushes their conference record to 4-1 on the season. This will give them the third seed and they will match up with ULM in Match 3 of the Sun Belt Tournament Championship. They will play at 1:30 P.M. CT on Thursday, April 23.
Looking at their whole season, the Golden Eagles hold a 14-19 record across all of their games. After starting 3-17, they went 4-0 at home in the Spring Break Slam and went 7-5 to end the season, including three conference wins in the Sun Belt Midseason Tournament.
