Stanislovaitis stood with tears in her eyes, faced with the reality that her time as a member of the Syracuse volleyball team was over. Even though the Orange missed the playoffs in her final season, it didn’t affect the way Stanislovaitis felt about her time with the team.

She felt fortunate to be a part of it all.

‘I think looking back on it, I’ve been given a gift,’ Stanislovaitis

On Senior Day, Syracuse’s volleyball season came to an end after a 3-1 loss at the hands of Louisville. Stanislovaitis

Hayley Todd and Sarah Hayes didn’t get the chance to go to the playoffs in their final year with the Orange. At times during the year, the thought that this team wouldn’t be making the trip to Pittsburgh for the Big East tournament would have been incomprehensible.

There were highs and lows. Huge wins and crushing losses. Stretches of nothing but dominance mixed with stretches of struggles. Syracuse beat some of the conference’s best teams and lost to some of the worst. Any player on the team will attribute that to life in the Big East, where anything is possible.

‘I always thought we were going to make it,’ said Hayes, a defensive specialist. ‘It can’t always work. We did everything we could.’

At times, everything was enough. Especially during the Orange’s nonconference schedule, when it piled up victories over teams that never had a chance. During one stretch of the season, the Orange went 10 straight matches without losing a single set. Winning was easy.

Each victory was just one step closer to Syracuse making the postseason. There was nothing stopping the Orange as it went through the schedule unchallenged. SU may have been beating teams that weren’t up to its level, but to the Syracuse coaches, that schedule was filled with teams that were far from pushovers.

‘Any given day, if you have a bad day, any of those teams are going to beat you,’ assistant coach Carol LaMarche said. ‘Those were intense games. Any moment, we could’ve lost any of them.’

‘Any moment’ never came. Syracuse won them all. But those moments did come once the Orange opened up its Big East schedule. Suddenly, SU couldn’t make any mistakes during those matches because opponents would capitalize. And the fact that on any given day Syracuse could lose was true more than ever.

Throughout the season, LaMarche said the best team on the court for those two hours during a match is going to win. And that team doesn’t have to have the best record or the best talent. Just the best two hours.

Once conference play started, having the best two hours began to be a problem for Syracuse. Winning became increasingly difficult, and losses started to send the Orange to the bottom of the conference standings.

‘We knew we were going to have to perform every weekend in order to push forward to the tournament,’ outsider hitter Todd said. ‘It didn’t exactly go the way we wanted it to.’

Syracuse finished the season with a 5-9 Big East record. Some of the losses during the year made sense. The Orange lost to some of the best conference teams, including Cincinnati, Louisville and Marquette. Other losses didn’t. At the bottom of the conference is DePaul, which beat one Big East team — Syracuse.

Through all of that, the highs and the lows, the big wins and the crucial losses, being a part of the team that has the program’s best start to a season isn’t lost on any member of the Orange. Even though the playoffs remained elusive, every player can be proud of the season overall, LaMarche said. That will make it easier to wipe away the tears.

‘It’s a pretty significant start,’ LaMarche said. ‘They can’t forget that. Although we didn’t make it to the Big East (tournament), it’s not a failure.’

cjiseman@syr.edu

Published on November 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chris: cjiseman@syr.edu | @chris_iseman