The Illinois volleyball team completed its spring practice schedule and kicked off the summer with an eight-day trip to Italy to face Italian competition. The Daily Illini caught up with head coach Kevin Hambly to discuss the latest in Illini volleyball.

The Daily Illini: We haven’t talked since Italy, how was the trip?

Kevin Hambly: It was everything we wanted it to be, it was perfect. We got better as a volleyball team, and the training time beforehand was huge. I feel like we got a lot better during that time. The bonding time that the girls had there was great, and I thought everything about it was fantastic, including having a good time and also the girls getting to know each other and the staff better. It was exactly what you would hope from the experience.

DI: What was your favorite city on the trip?

Hambly: Bergamo, actually. It wasn’t one of my favorite experiences necessarily, but it was kind of a cool, sleepy little town, and it had a really cool castle that we walked to the top of. It was my favorite by far.

DI: We’ve talked before about this being a young team, do you think this kind of trip sort of accelerates their learning curve?

Hambly: So in the spring, we have six weeks, 30 days, that we can train for 20 hours a week. And we had eight days to train and then two days off so over 10 days we had eight days to train. So it was almost a third more training time and when you get that much more time to train, especially when you’re going two-a-days, certainly it helps steepen the learning curve, and we learned a lot. 

I think they really came together, and we approached the spring that we were going to do that, and we were going to have a couple more weeks to train, and we did a lot of six-versus-six. We refined our system, our offensive system, our defensive system so that training time was great for us, and it was exactly what I wanted to get out of it.

DI: Was there any player that stood out, whether it be in the spring or in Italy, that surprised you with how well she played?

Hambly: The whole team worked hard. I thought the most improved were our two middles, Maddie Mayers and Kathryn Polkoff. Lizzie McMahon was incredible the last two nights in Italy. She was as good for those two nights as any of the players I’ve had, she was remarkable. I think she had over 20 points against the Italian national team and she tore up the Italian junior national team. Jocelynn Birks got better, especially in the back row with defense and passing. Everyone got better but Lizzie stood out at the end, and I thought the two middles were the most improved.

DI: So what now? You can’t contact the team right now, is that right?

Hambly: That’s right. Well, we can contact the team, we’re in communication with them but we can’t train them.

DI: OK, so all of the practices and workouts that they’re doing now is run by players?

Hambly: Yeah, Jennifer Beltran is doing a lot of that. She’s been managing all of the practices.

DI: So for you, is this a little bit of time off?

Hambly: No, this is a real busy time for us, actually. I just got back from Orlando last night around 11:30 p.m., we’re here for three days and have a recruit on campus, and then I leave for five or six more days to go to Dallas for another recruiting opportunity. Then, I’m home for three more days until we start camp which is a few weeks long and two days after that we go and do some more recruiting. So, this is actually one of the busiest times of the year for us.

DI: Yeah, sounds like you’ve been out of town a lot. So in recruiting, are you already looking at certain players or just going to big events to look at a big group of players?

Hambly: Little bit of both. There’s kids we’re familiar with and kids we’re trying to identify with potential.

DI: Gotcha. I think you’ve mentioned before that volleyball recruiting is super young, right?

Hambly: Yeah it is, we’ve been looking at 2017’s, which are eighth-graders. Well, we’re not recruiting them necessarily, but we’re definitely looking at them.

DI: Okay, well try not to work too hard.

Hambly: Well I’m willing to work hard, we got to get better.

Stephen can be reached at [email protected] and @steve_bourbon.