Lady Rattlers scrimmage with Lockhart, prep for season

Lady Rattler Volleyball was back in San Marcos Monday afternoon.

The purple and white matched up with local 5A opponent Lockhart in the squad’s second scrimmage leading up to the regular season. The scrimmage was played in two 25-minute sessions inside the Snake Pit. The scrimmage was the Lady Rattlers last before opening the regular season.

“I saw some good stuff, we ran a 5-1 (rotation and I) just wanted to see how it all (worked) out,” head coach Megann Ollett said. “We still have some stuff to fix — setting our block, running through on defense — but I feel like it’s all fixable. I’d rather have stuff to fix than be at our peak right now. And then in the second (session), we went 6-2, and I was able to get a lot more people in. So that’s promising to me that we’re able to play our bench and people were still resilient and moving forward.”

San Marcos has played a pair of scrimmages to prepare for their regular season, facing off with 6A opponent Round Rock Cedar Ridge last Friday. Ollett has seen improvement from her team throughout the two exhibitions.

“So when we started practicing, I preached to them that we have to attack that third ball every single time and they were real slow,” Ollett said. “I feel like we’ve gotten better at embracing that, and they’re really looking to attack that third ball at all times even if it’s an out of system ball. I still think that needs to be cleaned up and still look more in system as opposed to just looking like a gather and approach. But they’re really embracing some of the changes, and some of the stuff we’ll just take slow (like) breaking old habits.”

Another key for the Lady Rattlers’ first year under Ollett is communication.

San Marcos had stretches last season where the team would have quiet lapses, and the departure of seven seniors made that even more of a point of emphasis for Ollett’s squad. When Lockhart was able to build momentum in their exhibition, it coincided with a lack of talking on the purple and white’s end.

“I literally just (told the team) that we have to over-communicate,” Ollett said. “Because I feel like there’s times where they go quiet, and they’re working on it, and I feel like they’re being resilient. But there’s some proactive stuff that they could have done to not have to worry about being resilient, because there are going to be tougher times that you’re gonna need to be a different resilient over just communicating.”

The Lady Rattlers kick off their 2022 regular season Tuesday when they head north on I-35 to face Pflugerville at 6:30 p.m. San Marcos then heads south to Corpus Christi for the CCISD tournament over the weekend from Aug. 11-13.

“My mentality going into tomorrow and most of the preseason is that we just need to work on fixing the errors and controlling what we can control,” Ollett said. “Because it doesn’t matter what happens right now. It (matters) when we get to district. There’s things that we need to fix, so every game is an experience to learn something from whether or not we walk away with the W or the L. We have something that we need to take forward so that we’re ready to go come district and then hopefully into the postseason.”