Tonight was the first official sporting event in the DJ Sokol Arena at the Ryan Center on the Creighton campus with the Volleyball team’s annual Blue-White scrimmage. Here are some observations of the Kirsten Bernthal Booth coached squad and the Sokol Arena environment after tonight.
Volleyball Team
The feature of the night was the first look at the Volleyball team as they prepare for their first real matches of the season starting next Friday, August 28th in the Bluejay Invitational where they open against Texas Tech.
Joining the 2009 team in the scrimmage were three players from last season. Amanda Cvejdlik, Korie Lebeda and Bianca Rivera added their seasoned skills against the younger Bluejays. It was the Blue team, which was made up of what looked to be this year’s starters, against the White team, which consisted of the three graduates and several of the newcomers. The Blue team took the first set very easily, but then the teams were switched around for the other four sets of the night with the White team winning the rest of the sets. Cvejdlik played exclusively for the White team and led all players with 18 kills but there were some newcomers that looked pretty good as well.
Freshman Heather Thorson played a lot with the top Blue unit in each of the sets and looked very comfortable out there. Libero Nayka Benitez has a wicked jump serve and led all player with 22 digs. Brooke Boggs was a killer for the White team with her serving and Alicia Runge and Lisa Greisch put in pretty good performances. Megan Bober has a lot of responsibility placed on her shoulders in replacing Korie Lebeda. Though she had some challenging moments, will make an impact on the team this season. The Omaha World Herald ran a nice feature on Megan this weekend.
One returning player that seemed to be heard over and over on the public address system was Laurel Sanford. She came to play tonight with several kills and blocks. I might have missed this, but I did not see Senior Sarah Schulze play tonight.
Sokol Arena Environment
The environment in Sokol Arena was in some ways like a mini Qwest Center. The Pep Band was in the house tonight and the acoustics are enough that it will produce quite the sound. They sounded really good for their first outing.
As far as concessions go, many are used to Creighton being an all Pepsi product campus and the Qwest Center is all Pepsi, but some may be happy to know that the concessions at Sokol includes the sweet 23 flavors of Dr. Pepper. Just a funny little observation.
One thing that may need to be looked into are the windows on the top west side. As much as fans were worried about the open windows on the south side, the windows on the west side is what people might need to be concerned about. At 6:30 the sun comes through those west windows and make it irritating enough to fans on the east side seats that it is hard to see and concentrate on what is on the court. It probably wasn’t until about the 3rd or 4th set that the sun had gone down enough that it was not noticeable. With most matches starting at 7:00 (one at 6:00 in September) this season and although as summer goes to fall the sun will be in different positions, but there might be a need for blinds on those top windows as well that could be drawn if necessary or fans will need to get tickets on the West side of the court.
The huge ceiling fan above the court did run at a slow pace throughout the contest.
As for the crowd, there was probably about 300-400 fans in the house this evening cheering the Volleyball team on. As we left the arena, Morrison Soccer Stadium was all abuzz with a full crowd as the Men’s Soccer team was up 6-0 on the Red Fury in their exhibition game also going on this evening..