Fresh off a Sweet 16 appearance from last year, the 2017 Lady Raiders volleyball team is aiming for the same success this season in spite of the drastic turnover.
No coach is immune to turnover, and Lindsay Herrin (7th season) is no different. She’s had to replace some key seniors in the program pretty much every season after a group graduates. While that’s often hard to deal with, this time it’s even tougher, as four-year mainstay Lainey Gosnell has moved on to Appalachian State on a basketball scholarship.
“I don’t think you can replace a Lainey,” says Herrin. “A talent like that is so rare. However, I feel like this year’s group might be more fundamentally sound than any I’ve had, even after losing an impact player like her.”
Gosnell isn’t the first of her kind to move on from Herrin and the Lady Raiders volleyball program though — the year before Gosnell came in as a freshman, that person was Haley Gerrin, also a four-year mainstay on the team and also a collegiate basketball star.
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This year, Herrin and the Lady Raiders are off to an 8-3 start overall. While there’s certainly room for improvement, it’s clear that the foundation of this program – built on players like Gerrin and Gosnell, is in good shape.
Herrin explains in her BLITZ interview that while she is proud of the 8-3 start, the three losses sting a little, and there are some areas that she feels the girls need to work on before region play starts in a little more than a week.
The five-senior Lady Raiders class is looking for another historic run. There’s a lot of time between now and then, but the girls couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2017.
