Eastern hosted its high school volleyball camp last week, which brought girls from as far away as Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Erin Hake came to Eastern’s camp to improve her volleyball skills and gain more knowledge and experience about the game of volleyball. Hake experienced more than she expected when she jumped for a ball and landed on someone else’s foot causing her to sprain her ankle. Instead of complaining and being upset for the time she lost at camp, she put ice on her injury and made the best of the situation by sitting on the side of the court and watching and learning from her fellow campers’ experiences.

“They do swing blocking here, I’ve never done it, but from just watching it I’ve definitely learned a lot, but it’ll be interesting to see if I can do it,” Hake said.

Head volleyball coach Lori Bennett said that the ankle sprain was not a severe one, and that Hake would be able to start practicing again by the next day.

Hake is a recruit for the 2007 season at Eastern, and her time at camp gave her the chance to meet the coaches as well as some of her future teammates.

Like all summer sports camps, Eastern’s volleyball camps purpose is to help all the participants to become better and to give them a fun experience.

“This is an all positions camp, but it gets more detailed into playing defense and builds passing, setting and hitting into one big game situation and we want to teach the girls more of a concept of volleyball rather than just the skills of volleyball,” assistant volleyball coach Cheryl Astrauskas said.

Astrauskas believes that the most important thing the girls can learn from this camp would be the knowledge and thinking side of the game. She said that there is a lot of thought that goes into volleyball, like reading the opponents and teaching the girls to see things and learn things and develop as a whole volleyball player, not just a physical volleyball player.

“This is a general skills camp so we break down every skill and teach the girls how to do it from start to finish, and then we teach them how to implement that into their game,” Bennett said.

“We work on offensive systems and defensive systems, and even though those are going to be different than what they do in their high school, it’s still exposure to new and different things.”

Bennett hopes that by the end of camp all the girls realize that if they work hard and make commitments to doing something, they can be good at it and it can still be fun.

The camp included close to 20 high school girls and lasted nearly 12 hours a day. Three of the girls at the camp are incoming freshman to Eastern and will play on the volleyball team, and Hake is committed to coming to play at Eastern in 2007. Bennett said that the camp should help the girls familiarize themselves with Eastern and that she feels the girls could definitely make an impact on the coming season.

Laura Bolbig, a junior from Mattoon High School, prepares for a serve during the girls high school volleyball camp in Lantz Arena Friday morning.

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