Charger women’s volleyball 2025 team headshot
Courtesy | Hillsdale College Athletic Department
Charger women’s volleyball is currently ranked second in the Great Midwest Athletic Conference. After a small setback of injuries and losing the Great Midwest Athletic Conference tournament to Findlay University, head coach Chris Gravel said the team recovered over the summer and is ready to bring its all to the new season.
Senior outside hitter Emory Braswell was injured last season and unable to play, but said she now is ready to get back in the game. The team has been practicing for several weeks, getting to know its new members, discussing strategy, and setting goals.
“I would say our main goal right now is to win all of our conference games and to win the conference tournament,” Braswell said. “We all have personal goals that we stay on top of throughout the season, but they all kind of work together for that big goal of winning conference and hopefully go even further into the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament.”
Sophomore outside hitter Ellie Fles acknowledged the importance of having good relationships within the members of the team while off the court and hopes that the girls will be strong in that this year, even more so than the last.
“How we work together as a team, what we do off the court, what we’re doing in practice all leads up to that finish and hopefully this year we can be even better,” Fles said.
According to Braswell, there are already good relationships between the upperclassmen and the freshman.
“We are focusing on relationships, building relationships early so we can kind of establish trust with them, and that has impacts on the court but also off the court,” Braswell said.
Gravel said the team is putting a lot of their focus on trust and letting that drive them in all areas of the game. According to Gravel, trust is ranked number one in “the five necessary functions of a team,” a foundation for his team modeled off of the book, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.”
“The trust that we’re looking for is really when things get tough you can put yourself out there without any guarantee of how your teammates are going to respond,” Gravel said. “But you really got to trust them a lot to do that, to put yourself in that vulnerable state.”
With a foundation of trust the team can then discuss what strategies they want to implement throughout the season. Fles said they often watch footage from old practices or games to see where they can improve and better attack the opponent.
“We’ll probably watch film before a game to see what our opponents’ tendencies are, what areas of the court we want to attack, where their weaknesses might be,” Fles said. “Then, in practice we work on exploiting that.”
According to Gravel, the Chargers have been focusing a lot on their mental state and how that will help them on the court.
“We’ve been talking a lot about getting into the zone, and we also talked about how we do that: creating an alter ego with ourselves, so we develop an alter ego and bring it to the fight every day,” Gravel said. “So they’ve been developing their alter egos to be like warriors on the court while we play our opponents, and we’re going to keep developing that and make it stronger.”
According to Gravel, although the women on the volleyball team are warriors as soon as they step onto the court, they are always respectful.
“Obviously in our practices we’re always working to become better and be the best we can be. So we always work on respecting our opponent,” Braswell said.
