All three of our juniors are studying abroad this Spring, and our first highlight will be from Caitlin, who's studying in Argentina.  She's doing a home stay and had two different families hosting her during her stay.  Pictured here is the first family to host her, along with Caitlin's family and some other MIDD friends, followed by her second host family. Next, we have the picture of the outside of her university in Buenos Aires.  It sounds like Caitlin is having a fantastic time exploring, learning from her host families, having family visit, and having adventures ..read more

Fire and Ice was our location of choice this year for our Team Banquet.  It's always a fun time to come together again and celebrate our season.  There are certificates to hand out from the many post-season awards, but also the Team votes on a handful of awards, and then we celebrate our Seniors!  Our Team Awards winners this year were the following: Panther Pride "Best Teammate"--Kelly Ferrero Culinary Logistics--Katie Kraczkowsky (I came up with this one because Katie was such a huge help with the food orders on our road trips!) MCVB Spirit "Positive and motivational spir ..read more

 It was a great season overall, and I'm very proud of this team!  We ended with a 16-9 overall record; 7-3 Conference record, good for #3 seed in the NESCAC Tournament.  We also finished ranked 2nd in New England, earning one of THREE at-large bids for NESCAC teams.  In typical fashion after a season like this, we had many people getting honors in the post-season awards.Once again, this year, like last year, every upperclassman on the team was honored as an Academic All-NESCAC team member.  Freshmen aren't eligible, but to have every other member of the team achieve t ..read more

  After a first round game that saw most people get into the game, we faced a very tough second round opponent in the host school, Johns Hopkins.  Against Manhattanville, Lauren led the way with 8 kills, followed by a trio of players with 6 (Kaite, Ava, Molly), and the Lexi and Steph had 5 and 3 kills respectively.  We led in every statistical category and had a somewhat dominant performance.  It was a great match, and a good start to our weekend!  (It was also my 500th win, which as coaches, we know just means I've been around a long time, but nice to get that miles ..read more

Despite not advancing to the NESCAC Championship game, we earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament!  We ended the season ranked 2nd in New England, and earned the 3rd seed for our Regional at John's Hopkins University, playing Manhattanville in the first game.   Because of the extremely long drive, we practiced early in the morning before classes on Tuesday, and then departed after the last class that day for NJ.  We stopped along the way to pick up Thai takeout--our preferred dinner on the road, and then went on to NJ to spend our first night.   Then w ..read more

During the season, we celebrated four birthdays with three players and our assistant coach, Brian.  First up, we had Kelly on the 11th of September.  Followed at the end of the month by Brian, whose wife Sylvie baked us all celebration cupcakes after our Tufts victory at home!  And then we had Steph on the 10th of October and I baked the gluten free, vegan chocolate cupcake recipe that we all agreed was surprising good!  I recreated it for Gabbie's birthday on Nov. 1.   I'm not sure how we missed taking a photo of Kelly's birthday, and then Gabby Pribisich h ..read more

One of the bonus features of a longer pre-season is that we get to help out the Middlebury HS volleyball team with some practices and skill building.  We also partnered with them to raise awareness about mental health and change the stigma to being one of understanding.  This partnership with the newly formed Varsity HS team is a very rewarding experience for our team and for their young team as well, so it's a wonderful, shared experience expressing our collective love of the game of volleyball. Once we actually started the season, we played a tough non-Conference invitational ..read more

Lots has happened since my last update, so we'll try to summarize things here.  We welcomed our new freshmen at our Team BBQ at my house as our first gathering of the new year.  Fun times, despite the bugs--it was a super wet summer here in VT, so the mosquitos were fierce this Fall!  Pre season was full of practice, meetings, bonding time, and lots of volleyball fun. The pictures below are of each class, starting with seniors and moving down to the new freshman class.  It's a really fun group and we're enjoying working together and competing every day.  Practices ar ..read more

Graduation day was another gorgeous day in what was a gorgeous Spring here in VT!  I'm so proud of these young women.  Lucy Ambach (Molecular Biology and Biochemistry) and Manya Kula (Psychology) were both honored with Magna Cum Laude status, and both Laney Sullivan (Economics) and Addie Mahler (Joint Environmental Studies/Biology) were Summa Cum Laude, so right off the bat that's an impressive group of seniors! On top of that, Laney received high honors by the Econ Department and was also the recipient of the D.K. Smith Economics Prize.  This is an award given to the studen ..read more

Addie, Kelly and Laney all had thesis or senior work presentations this Spring, but at a later date than my previous post around the time of the Spring Symposium, and all three were fantastic.  Addie's was an oral presentation, and Laney's was a poster presentation, as was Kelly's.  Kelly did another presentation on her thesis work, this time in poster form, and it was fun to see the adjustments she'd made from the earlier time of her oral presentation for the Spring Symposium.   I'm not sure you can read the titles of all of these presentations, but Addie's was for ..read more