With the volleyball regular season heading into its final weekend, the Wayne State College volleyball team is sitting at 17-1 in conference play.
WSC is prepping for the volleyball squad to win out and potentially host a Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Tournament here in Wayne, Nebraska.
The NSIC Tournament will take place on Tuesday, November 18, and will continue on Friday, and Saturday November 21-22.
While this major event will be happening on Tuesday and possibly Friday, and Saturday, Wayne State College is preparing its men’s and women’s basketball programs to open their homestand on the same days.
WSC’s Athletic Director, Mike Powicki, elaborated on how the traffic will be managed throughout the course of the week while the NSIC Tournament takes place.
“Having some collaboration and flexibility with our coaching staff and having them understand that when you have those opportunities to certainly host postseason events that are really based on what if scenarios, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to be happening,” Powicki said.
“You really just have to get super creative and be flexible. Not only with practice times, certainly at times we’ve had teams had to practice off campus at our community center knowing we have to have the gym set up for our competition when our events overlap,” Powicki said.
Powicki also stated that the women’s basketball game against Chadron State on Saturday November 22 has a tip off time that is subject to change based on the outcomes of the NSIC Tournament. The current time is scheduled for 5:00p.m. CST.
Between the final service point this upcoming Saturday, and first serve next Tuesday, the Wildcats will not know if they will host the NSIC Tournament until after the conclusion of all games this Saturday.
Nonetheless, it will be a quick turnaround for the Wildcats and Rice Auditorium if they are rewarded as the host site for all games in the NSIC Tournament.
“It’s a pretty quick turnaround really, come this weekend all things being equal if we win out like we plan on doing, worst case scenario is we’ll be co-champions with another school in the league,” Powicki said.
“It really comes down to this calculation of analytics that goes into who’s truly, even though we’re both co-champions, who’s the number one seed, who’s the number two seed,” Powicki said. “We’re not going to know that likely until Saturday night after we get off the court.”
“It’s been known for a while we’re going to host that Tuesday night conference first round game, and then it really comes down to who is hosting that semifinal and finals even if you’re the number two seed and the number one seed gets upset, which can happen in our league especially in volleyball we’re really deep, you have to be prepared to pivot and be the host,” Powicki said.
“Even though those what if scenarios are quick turnarounds, we’ve been talking about it and planning for it for a couple of weeks, and we have all of our things. It’s really just having the approach of we’re going to plan on hosting it and if we don’t, some of our staff have the night off.” Powicki added on the preparation for the upcoming tournament.
With the prestige of NSIC Volleyball and the NSIC Tournament, WSC sees many benefits in the athletic department that come with hosting the grand event.
“Point of pride. Certainly, for our teams, in this case our volleyball program they’ve earned the right to be at home and be the number one team in a conference that’s likely the best volleyball conference in the country, I think that’s a point of pride of how solid our program is so that’s one,” Powicki said.
“Two we feel, at least here at Wayne State, and I think the sentiments across the league that we get feedback that our staff is one of the best in the conference at putting on an event the professional for which, Mike Grosz our sports information director, handles stats and makes sure that’s working, Mike Karnes, John Schwarte, all those guys who do game management and operations, and all the student workers that we rely on, KWSC Sports included in the level of our streaming, the quality of that. We put on a really good show and we really host teams at a high level, even though we want to beat them, we want to beat them really bad, you know we want to make sure they feel comfortable and they feel like we have done our job.” Powicki added on what helps make hosting the NSIC Tournament a benefit.
Wildcat volleyball’s last two regular season matches are at home in Rice Auditorium this Friday, November 14 at 6 p.m. vs. Jamestown, and Saturday, November 15 at 5 p.m. vs. Northern State.
