At times in the 2019-20 season the St. Thomas University Tommies men’s volleyball team seemed invincible. During an 11 game winning streak went 8 matches without dropping a single set.
The Tommies finished first in the ACAA with a 12-3 record and will face Anthony Jacques and the USA Dragons on day of the ACAA Championships.
“You can’t stop a guy the level of Jacques, but we’ll need to find a way to slow him down if we want to have success against USA,” said Tommies head coach, Henri Mallet. “Obviously, we’ll have to serve tough to hopefully put more pressure on him being out of system and we’ll need our guys to be disciplined on their block.”
The Tommies enter the ACAA Championships with tons of firepower. Christian Christie, Dallas Melnick and Adam McDougall finished second, fourth and sixth, respectively, in kills per set. Garret Dickson finished the season with a .299 attack percentage, which would have placed him second in the ACAA had he had enough total attacks to qualify. Mallet knows the key to his offence runs through his team’s passing, and having 4th year libero, Nathan Brown, back in the mix for playoffs will be a big help.
“Having Nathan back will help us with his experience as he’s our only fourth year player, but if we can stabilize our passing, we are confident we’ll be able to have some success offensively as we have many different options.”
Mallet also doesn’t see any issues for his team after finishing first in the league.
“I don’t see any added pressure from finishing first. We play in a competitive league. We are happy that we were able to compete and execute during the regular season and we are confident in our play but understand we’ll have to step up our play even more as there’s four good teams in the tournament.”
With the Tommies hosting the CCAA Men’s Volleyball Championships in March they have already sealed their place in the tournament, but Mallet knows that his team doesn’t want that to be the reason they are in the tournament.
“Our guys are hungry to win an ACAA Championship.”