SMC volleyball scores win against San Bernadino

It has long been a point of debate among sports fans on whether or not trash talking works in distracting players on the field of play. However, if the denizens of the San Bernadino Valley College Women's Gym wanted to run an experiment on the effectiveness of noise from the peanut gallery during Friday night's women's volleyball match between the Santa Monica College Corsairs and the SBVC Wolverines, it would have behooved them to have begun earlier.

By the time Corsair hitter Jade Morning complained to match officials about the inappropriate language coming from the crowd, it was not a question of if the Lady Corsairs would win, but by how much.

By the end of the night the crowd walked out silently after witnessing the Corsairs sweep the Wolverines in three straight games: 25-19, 25-13 and 25-14.

It was a game filled with multiple runs by the Corsairs, including winning eight of the first ten points in the final game of the match.

"We're a tough serving team, so we get a lot of aces and our ability to play defense on the first ball over helps us go on runs," SMC head coach Nicole Ryan said.

Though SMC never gave control to SBVC, unforced errors became a problem again in the early going as 11 of the Wolverines 19 points in the first set came from unforced Corsair errors.

"Minimizing our unforced errors is huge," Ryan said. "We need to stay consistent. Almost half the points we gave to the opponent [in game one] came from unforced errors and after that we played almost error less."

In the second game the Corsairs committed seven errors and only five in the third game. "If we can continue to do that, we will be really successful," Ryan said.

The results of the crowd's smack talk experiment was a failure on both the macro and micro level as Greta Schmittdiel led SMC with 15 kills on the night, followed by Morning with 10 kills and a .240 kill percentage.

The two combined for over half of the Corsairs' 42 kills in the game.

The win bodes well for the chances for the first winning season for the Corsairs since the Bush presidency as the ladies improved to 7-4 on the season and extended their winning streak to four games.

Friday night marked the fifth straight game sweep on the season and is the second half of back to back sweeps, with the first coming a week earlier against Saddleback College.

The ladies will next play at home against Los Angeles Mission College on October 1 at 6:00 p.m.