February 23, 2020…WELLAND – The Niagara College women's volleyball team is heading back to the OCAA Championships after an easy 3-0 (25-11, 25-16, 25-21) win over the Georgian Grizzlies in Saturday afternoon's east-west cross-over match.
Niagara will be heading back to the OCAA Championship for a 6th time after finishing last year's championship as the sliver medalists. Niagara is five-time medalist at the OCAA Championships.
Saturday's match-up against the 11-7 Grizzlies gave head coach Steve Dow a chance to rest his starters and allow for some newer faces to shine.
"All year we've had a philosophy of 'next Knight up'," said Dow. For the second weekend in a row, we've had starting players fighting injury. Brooke Parkes did an awesome job starting for our program and putting up a game high in points (11K, 1BS, 2SA). As a team we did a pretty good job forcing Georgian to play into our teams strengths. We forced them to play out of system and that allowed our blockers to have the advantage taking away shots and funneling balls to our strong defenders.
The Knights will face a tough test in their first round at the OCAA Championship, going up against Durham College. The Lords finished with a perfect 18-0 record this season, finishing on top of the OCAA East Division. Dow suspects his team will rise to the challenge.
"We still need to show a higher level of consistency throughout the match. We are about to go play one of the nations top teams I will need to put our best effort forward. Durham's a great team, but I think we match up well against them."
The Knights will hit the road to North Bay to begin their quest for a championship banner on Feb 27th against Durham at 8:30 P.M.
Full for results, live stream and stats, please visit: https://ocaachampionships.com/championships/wvbl/2019-20/index
