Mercer enjoying its best ever season on the beach

Mercer’s beach volleyball team is heading to the A-Sun Tournament with the best record it has ever had: 14-10 overall while maintaining a 4-0 record at home.

The Bears will seeded second in the conference tournament and will open against Florida Gulf Coast on Saturday. The tournament will be played in Deland, Florida.

Head coach Damian Elder said after the team played its first couple of matches, it looked like this year would be an improvement over last year.

“The second round of matches we played five matches in a row against top 10 teams in the country, and so people really got the idea of what was going to happen for the season based on those matches,” Elder said.

The Bears opened their season with four wins before a loss to Georgia State.

Elder said his players should be able to look back fondly at this season because of all they have accomplished and what they have struggled through, at one point even playing a match in snowy weather.

“We’ve sort of dovetailed the beach season onto the best indoor season in 10 years,” Elder said. “The beach season took that momentum and have just continued it.”

The team lost its final regular-season match against North Florida to snap a three-match winning streak. Still, the Bears head to the tournament with their highest chances of winning in years.

“They’ve had to work really hard to consolidate a lot of work into not as much time and produce these results,” Elder said of his players.

Lela McIntosh, a sophomore, said she remembered coming in her freshman year and being disappointed with how the Bears performed that year. She said that their expectation to win against certain teams may have led to them underestimating some teams and losing against teams they didn’t expect to.

The team went 10-13 last season, which was unsatisfactory for many of the players.

“This year we came in with a new mindset of just getting after it with everything, no matter if they’re the worst in our conference or the best in our conference,” McIntosh said. “You have to give it everything in every game and show that we are one of the best teams here and prove it to everybody.”

Demi-Shay Watchorn, a senior, said as the season comes to a close there are still many things that the team is doing to stay in top shape without overexerting themselves. This mostly involves light weight training and recovery exercises to avoid getting too loose.

“Everything we’ve done up to this point is leading to the conference championship,” Watchorn said. “The goal is always to win the conference championship, to get rings and make our school proud.”

This story was originally published April 18, 2017 at 1:51 PM with the headline "Mercer enjoying its best ever season on the beach."