A very young UMBC Volleyball team will begin head coach Cristina Robertson's third season at the helm on Sunday when it hosts cross-town rival Coppin State at 2 p.m.
All home matches are slated to be played at the UMBC Event Center Auxiliary Gym with no fans permitted in attendance. Live stats will be available HERE for fans to follow along as there will be no live video broadcast. Fans can also follow @UMBCVolleyball on social media for updates.
Six of the twelve players on the roster are new, including five freshmen from five different countries.
The final new member of the team is graduate student libero Loren Teter who spent the previous four years at San Diego State. Last season, Teter led the Aztecs with a career-high 396 digs and 3.60 digs per set, and was named to the Mountain West All-Academic Team,
Four of the returning players are only sophomores, but Kayla Tomas (Silver Spring, Md.), Riley Putnicki (Monument, Colo.), Kamani Conteh (New Castle, Del.) and Emily Ferketic (Pittsburgh, Pa.) all played a significant amount last season.
Lone senior, Anouk Van Noord (Amsterdam, Netherlands) only came to UMBC last season after two seasons at junior college, leaving junior Paige Krenik (Foothill Ranch, Calif.) to join Teter as the only players on the roster with more than two seasons of Division 1 experience.
Freshmen Darina Kumanova (Plovdiv, Bulgaria), Michela De Marzi (Milan, Italy), Beste Ayhan (Istanbul, Turkey) and Weronika Wrzesinska (Frednowy, Poland) round out the international additions, while Aysia Miller (Mililani, Hawaii) is the lone member of the freshman class from the U.S.
Scouting Coppin State (1-2)
The Lady Eagles enter Friday with a 1-2 record before playing MEAC rival Howard Friday night.
Coppin State lost a five set heartbreaker at home to Villanova last week in which they hit a five-set school record .320.
Chudear Tut was named the MEAC Volleyball Rookie of the Week while Kareemah Hopkins received Co-Setter of the Week honors. Hopkins matched a season-high with 11 kills and added a pair of blocks against Villanova. She also hit .304 for the match, committing just four errors on 23 swings.
Through three matches this season, Tut is second on the Eagles with 30 kills, a .294 hitting percentage and eight blocks. Tut ranks seventh in the MEAC in hitting percentage, eighth in kills and tenth in blocks.
