With the beginning of the regular season coming up this weekend, the DePauw women's volleyball team is prepared to start on the road.
Last weekend, the Tigers traveled to Washington University in St. Louis for a scrimmage tournament. DePauw finished the weekend 1-3 playing two games against Washington University, one against McKendree University and another against Webster University.
The matches took place on the same courts DePauw will play on this weekend.
"One of the reasons we chose to go to the scrimmage at Wash. U. is that it is the location of our first tournament," said head coach Deb Zellers.
"So that in itself was by design to get our team comfortable with the location and the facility to take a little bit of the edge off."
Not only is the court going to be familiar, but the competition as well.
The Tigers face off against the Washington Bears, and the weekend after, the Webster Gorloks.
"Overall, the weekend was sort of what we expected," Zellers said of last week's scrimmage. "We went into it with the goal of learning a lot about ourselves."
DePauw seems to have found what they needed in order to develop a baseline for the rest of the season. With all of the pre-season work together, the Tigers developed chemistry and understand the roles that they need to play as a team.
The upperclassmen have taken their leadership positions very seriously while the first-years have stepped into their roles on the team.
"We were able to see our returning players do a good job of assimilating the new players onto the court," Zellers said. "While we're young we have a lot of good experience in our youth."