Want to know what a dominant college volleyball team looks like?

Look no further than FCC’s Rams squad. The Rams have been nothing short of stellar thus far into the campaign.

Fresno is 16-1 through 17 matches, good enough to earn the fifth spot in the state rankings. The team has been so great in fact that they didn’t suffer their only loss of the season until their eighth match against Cabrillo.

Players cannot help but be happy about their level of play.

“I’d say we’re playing pretty consistent,” sophomore player Jenna Goldsberry said. “We work together as a team really well, and we get it done; we finish games pretty well.”

Perhaps more than anything else, depth and offensive balance is the key to the teams’ sustained success, and Rams’ first year head coach Kieran Roblee stated that she likes the makeup of her squad.

“One of the great things about our squad is we are very balanced with our offensive attack,” she said. “If you look at our stats you will see the balance of kills dispersed amongst our hitters.”

The coach praised the cohesiveness of the team. “It is a complement to our back row play to keep our team in our offensive system to allow our attack to be successful,” she said.

With such a great season in the making, one might wonder how much the team has been tested, to see how much resolve they have.

Those questions can be put to bed as the Rams have beaten multiple top 25 ranked programs including fourth ranked Cabrillo, ninth ranked Sierra, eleventh ranked Gavilan and twenty-second ranked Butte.

Quite a resume indeed. The key is that the Rams are a battle-tested squad that doesn’t back away from any challenge that they encounter.

To perform at such a high level, a team must be driven and that drive comes from within, according to sophomore Jennifer Luplow. The desire to get better even though they are good is what makes a good team a great team.

“I feel like we mostly challenge ourselves and it doesn’t matter who is on the other side of the net,”  Luplow said. “We just always want to be better, even if we win by a ton of points we are like ‘what can we do better’.”

That is the mindset this team possesses, and it starts at the head coach and trickles down to the players, which is a sign of good coaching and players that are receptive to being coached. Not all players are like that.

The season is far from over though and the Rams still have aspects of their game that need to improve in order for the team to achieve their goals of winning the conference and state championships.

Roblee said that in order to get better they need to keep their focus on the task at hand and not look too far ahead in the schedule, and the players feel the same way.

“We have a bit more to do before playoffs and if our vision jumps too far ahead it will create roadblocks. Have we made growth since the beginning of the season? Absolutely. Do we still see growth coming for the second half of conference? Yes,” Roblee said.

Luplow echoes her coach’s sentiments.

“We kind of agreed that we would take it one game at a time. Of course our overall goal is state but other than that we are just like ‘who are we playing next?’”

With almost exactly one month left in the season, the Rams are undoubtedly on the right track to accomplish winning themselves a state title.