The Southeast women’s volleyball team is gearing up for another season. Head coach Julie Yankus said she’s been impressed by many of the incoming freshmen and transfer players during the pre-season and is excited for what that skill means for the new season.

“We look really good, we’ve improved a lot,” Yankus said. “Our new people are getting acclimated very well.”

Since January of last year, the team has been working on leadership within the program by finding strong leaders among the team and teaching leadership to help deal with adversity.

Some of that adversity came last season when Yankus said the team dealt with injuries and not having another pin attacker “to take away the block” on the right side.

“Having two 6-foot-3 right sides helps to that, for sure,” Yankus said.

She’s talking about Haley Bilbruck and Madara Bajare, two new rightside hitters. Their height, she adds, really adds some offense on the right side and they are having a “great impact” on the program.

Yankus said she’s also been impressed by the pre-season progress of senior setter Allie Henkelman and outside hitter Madeline Grimm.

Seniors Krissa Gearring and Nzingha Clarke, Yankus said, are two standouts who have made a difference within the program.

“We have a lot of new people this year,” Gearring said. “So we’ve been practicing a lot and molding together. We’re connecting really well.”

Gearring is an outside hitter at 5-foot-8 who played in all 114 sets last season and was named First-Team All-OVC and voted Howard’s Most Valuable Player by her teammates.

Her teammate Clarke said, “Everyone flows on the court pretty well together, too.”

She added that she feels like her own game has been improving thanks to two weeks of two-a-days.

Standing at 6-foot-1, Clarke also played in all 114 sets last season, starting all but one. She also earned Second-Team All-OVC accolades.

Yankus said the team’s upperclassmen are leaders for the new players because they’ve been in the conference long enough to know how quickly the time passes for college ball. It inspires freshmen and transfer students, she adds, “to work hard and not to take it for granted.”

“The team needs confidence individually, we have to work on that and just know that confidence comes from within,” Yankus said. “We can’t win and then be confident, we have to find that confidence before the winning happens.”

Beating the adversity of previous years isn’t easy, but Clarke said the team is up to the challenge.

“We’re setting a championship culture right away through practices, even before pre-season started, before the coaches could get in here,” Clarke said. “We’ve already been setting that standard and building that culture for all of us.”

The Southeast women’s volleyball team will play in a New Orleans Tournament this weekend before competing in the Redhawks Invitational at the Show Me Center on Sept. 1 and 2.