Kodiak men’s volleyball team ready for championship challege

By Lethbridge Herald on February 21, 2024.

By Justin Seward

Lethbridge Herald

The Lethbridge College Kodiaks men’s volleyball team will travel to Olds College this weekend in what hopes to be an extended tournament for them as they vie for an ACAC championship.

The Kodiaks finished third in the South Division with a 12-6 record.

Ball control will be key to the Kodiaks success during championship.

“Ball control is always going to be what dictates our performance,” said Gibos.

“We’ve got Nolan (Moes), Tyler (Chernishenko) and Shaye (Wall) who do a lot of the work with our ball control there, and really when we’re passing, we think we’re one of the best teams in the country.”

The Kodiaks are one of the best attacking teams going in.

“I think we led the league in kills this year, which is always an exciting stat … to live by,” said Gibos.

“So for us,  like if we pass the ball well, we know we’re going to be in system and be a successful team (in) attacking right.”

Gibos does not think he has seen a field any deeper than the one that is going to be in Olds this weekend.

“It just goes to show like how good this conference is from top to bottom and we know that every single game is going to be an absolute dog fight when we get up there,” said Gibos.

The Kodiaks open up the championship against NAIT today, a team they played in their final weekend of regular season play.

“So it’s got a lot of recency for us, which is always nice,” said Gibos.

“We were able to watch some of the things  that they successfully did to us on the Friday night of our league game there and hopefully we were able to make some adjustments for playoffs now. They do a really good job controlling the middle of the court. (They’ve) got some old, experienced middle blockers and so they’re able to find them a lot and then they’ve got some dynamic outsides that they can run over top through the middle gap as well.”

Gibos knows it will be a big task for their middle blockers Marshall Qually, Karl Petkar and Koelbe Anderson in how they will counter NAIT’s attack.

“We’ve been spending  a lot of time training that in practice (and) getting them prepared for what we know is an old, experienced and … a very successful program these last three years,” said Gibos.

Lethbridge opens up against NAIT today at 1 p.m.

The championship schedule results can be found at www. acac.ab.ca. under the championship tab.