The State University of New York at New Paltz women's volleyball team enter the weekend at the Montclair tri-match against the hosting Red Hawks and visiting Farmingdale State on a four-game winning streak and is coming off its most impressive victory of the season Tuesday.
 
After a rough five-game start to the season where the Hawks went winless, missing several players along the starting rotation due to COVID protocols, the team rebounded with three wins this past weekend at the Hawks Invitational. They then opened up SUNYAC play on the road Tuesday against SUNY Oneonta and despite their offense stalling a bit, they gutted out three-straight set victories off good defense and great play at the net to extend their winning streak to four.
 
"Letisha [Perez] said it well, you feel that you're pretty good, you believe in yourself, but until you start to see results there's always that, 'are we really who we think we are?' And, it's always nice to see those," said SUNY New Paltz coach Matt Giufre. "I think we have some good matches under our belt and this team is playing a lot more mature than their age and experience shows and that was really true on Tuesday." 
The Hawks put an emphasis on serving the last few weeks after allowing 50-plus aces and recording more than 45 receiving errors during their losing streak but looked much improved at the Hawks Invitational against Mt. Saint Mary's College, Alfred University and Russell Sage College, and that continued against the Red Dragons, as they yielded just three aces and finished with only two receiving errors.
 
"We've worked a lot since the first week on our serving and that's cleaned up a lot. I think we've only missed five against Oneonta," Giufre said. "We cleaned that up for our own tournament and we've kept it for Tuesday and that was big, because we just want to make teams have to earn their points. We've worked a lot on out-of-system offense and that looked really good on Tuesday, and we're passing much better, so if we can balance out that and kind of get a little bit faster in our normal offense — we worked on that yesterday and we'll continue to work on that this week."
 
What carried the Hawks through a sweep of Oneonta Tuesday was their play at the net. They totaled a season-high 14 blocks in the game, getting many more tips at the net that the Red Dragons did well to cover. Middles Victoria Konicki and Letisha Perez led the Hawks offensively as well, as Konicki totaled a career-high nine kills, while hitting .235, and Perez finished with eight kills and hit a productive .313 in the game.
 
"The blockers did a great job on Tuesday, and we drill a little bit on just making sure their hands are in the right place, making sure where to be, but just relying on their size and aggressiveness to do most of it," Giufre said. "Our numbers on offense were OK Tuesday, but we could tell we weren't connecting as true as we want to. Oneonta defensively was good enough defensively to keep a lot of rally's alive and bring stuff back at us, so it was really cool to see our blocking step up to end points that we couldn't end with kills to give us a chance to continue some of those runs."
 
Through their first nine games, Perez leads the Hawks offensively with 61 kills, hitting .295 with 16 blocks, followed by junior outside Katie Steele with 51 kills, while Konicki and sophomore outside Mackenzie Williams each have 42 apiece with Konicki pacing the team with 22 blocks on the year. Sophomore setter Cate DiGiacomo has played well in her first collegiate season, totaling a team-most 201 assists, while junior libero Mia Waddell has led the way defensively with 110 digs to go along with eight service aces.
 
"We're putting a lot of emphasis on serving and offense," Giufre said. "We have big blockers and they did really well against Oneonta and we're a little bit more veteran on defense than we are on offense so we can kind of trust them to know what they're doing and they're doing a great job, so the emphasis has been keeping our serving clean and our offensive efficiency."
 
Farmingdale enters the weekend 3-5 overall, winning three of its last four games including Tuesday in a five-set win over Baruch. The Rams offense has struggled, hitting just .116. Freshman outside Cathleen Farrell leads the team with 53 kills, while junior outside Katie Flamio followed with 48 kills on the year. Sophomore Lexi Cavalieri has totaled 125 assists for Farmingdale, while also pacing her team with eight aces on the season.
 
For the Red Hawks, they've lost five of their first seven games including a five-set defeat to the hands of SUNY Cortland last Friday. They secured their second win of the season Tuesday after sweeping Rutgers-Camden but fell on the road to Manhattanville College Thursday in straight-sets.
 
Senior outside Carly Waterman paces the Montclair offense, totaling 100 kills, hitting .208 and averaging nearly four points per set. 
 
"These two matches on Saturday are really important, because it is more game experience and it's more game opportunity to learn from and more game opportunity to practice the winning mindset and find ways to gut it out and be successful," Giufre said. "If we play a clean that is great too, but anytime we can compete it's only going to make us better and just getting in-sync with each other."
 
The Hawks are set to face the Rams Saturday at 3 p.m. before playing the hosting Red Hawks at 5 p.m.
***********************

To stay up to date with everything #NPHawks be sure to follow us on Twitter at @nphawks, Instagram and Facebook at @newpaltzhawks, and subscribe to our Youtube channel, New Paltz Hawks.