From the start of the season, coach Jay Hosack has encouraged his George Mason University men’s volleyball team to play “big boy volleyball.”
“That means taking aggressive swings and never letting up,” junior outside hitter Christian Malias said, “playing the game in an aggressive style instead of being afraid of making a hitting error.”
The payoff is that George Mason is now playing with the big boys and is in the national championship tournament for the first time in 28 years.
One of six teams competing, the 11th-ranked Patriots, who won the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association title for the first time since 1988, face No. 2 Ohio State Tuesday, May 3, at Penn State University. A win advances Mason to the semifinals Thursday, May 5, against No. 3 UCLA.
The title match is May 7 against the team that comes out of the bracket of Erskine College, Long Beach State and top-ranked BYU.
“For us, the most important thing is being confident,” said Malias, a business administration major. “All of the pressure is on Ohio State, really. No one expected us to make it this far. We kind of embrace the challenge.”
“All year we’ve been preparing for this moment, so there’s no difference in my expectations today as there was four months ago,” said Hosack, in his first year as the Patriots’ coach after six seasons as a Penn Sate assistant. “Our guys have done a good job in continually pushing the bar higher throughout the course of the year.”
The players are hungry, Hosack said, not only for near-term success but to establish Mason as a perennial contender.
“Their goal is to leave a legacy that is of a team considered one of the top ones in the country,” Hosack said. “You earn that through hard work. You earn that through class. We earn that through integrity. We earn that through the way we respect our opponents.”
In other words, by playing big boy volleyball.