Taylor Louis and Amanda Green will represent the stars and stripes this summer. Marquette’s pair of outside hitters has been chosen for USA Volleyball’s Collegiate National Team training program. They were two of the total 36 players selected.
“The more experience, the more you see, the more you’ve touched a volleyball, the more you have,” head coach Ryan Theis said. “So for Amanda and Taylor to have an opportunity to do … USA for ten days this summer, it’s just more experience and that’s exactly what they need.”
The two players are at different stages in their Marquette careers. Louis is well established as the focal point of the Golden Eagle attack. She ranked in the top five in the country in kills per set last year and will likely continue to be one of the nation’s most potent attackers. For Louis, this camp is all about rounding the other parts of her game into form.
“Taylor’s got three goals to work on: her touch and middle back defense, her efficiency in attacking and her passing,” Theis said.
Green is now at the same place that her high school teammate Louis was in last year, as she is coming off of a redshirt year and preparing for game action. According to Theis, Green had the physical attributes to play right away, but she lacked the innate feel for the game of her more experienced teammates. That’s all beginning to change.
“It’s all about what’s going on on the other side of the net and how quickly (she) can process that,” Theis said. “And I think Amanda’s past that in terms of her redshirt season. I think she’s able to process what’s going on on the other side of the net just fine.”
Louis and Green will join sophomore Jenna Rosenthal on the team. All three players will play in June, but they are not in the same programs. USA Volleyball named Rosenthal to the 12-player U.S. Collegiate National Team, which will play in China for approximately two weeks. The program that Louis and Green were selected for is essentially a training camp that takes place in Indianapolis. It is the same camp that Rosenthal attended last year.
These camps ensure that all three players will have much busier off-seasons than usual. Marquette still has two more spring volleyball scrimmages left this month followed by a team trip to Europe in early June, where they will play against professional teams. That Marquette trip concludes June 9, which leaves Rosenthal with only nine days until her first training day in Los Angeles for the China tour. Green and Louis will have 12 days until the Indianapolis program begins.
With so many games and plane rides clustered together, fatigue can become a big problem. Theis admitted that there is some concern about exhausting some of Marquette’s most vital players with a strenuous summer. It is something he says he will take into account when planning the offseason schedule.
“We’re allowed to train before we go to Europe, but there will be off days built in,” Theis said. “Our goal is not to just pound out as much practice as we possibly can.”
Only four players from BIG EAST schools were chosen for Team USA. The only non-Marquette BIG EAST representative is Creighton’s outside hitter Jaali Winters, who won the conference’s Freshman of the Year award over Louis.
