What happens when you strip varsity status from a team, taking its coach and depriving it of its league and all the other benefits of a fully funded division one team?
If you are the Dartmouth men's volleyball club, you dominate.
The club, now in its second season since losing varsity status due to NCAA title nine regulations, is 23-1 this year, straight off a commanding Salem State Tournament victory this past weekend.
Dartmouth not only won the tournament for the second year in a row, but also won every game it played in the tournament for the second straight year, compiling a two-year 28 game winning streak at the competition.
"It's definitely not the biggest tournament of the year," Rick Fasani '96 said. "A lot of our larger rivals were not there even though there were some good teams."
The team even managed to get considerable playing time for every player on the bench.
In all honesty, it has not quite been fair for the rest of the college club teams that Dartmouth has had to face. The Big Green, still reeling from a strong varsity past, still have all the tools to compete at the Division 1 level, let alone at the less competitive club-sport status.
The change "has put us into a league where we have a chance to dominate," Fasani said. "When we were dumped from the varsity program we maintained the same practices, the same hard work. We have been successful by keeping up the varsity attitude."
That varsity attitude has kept the players focused towards their greater goals for the remainder of the season.
"We do feel we have a chance to win the Ivy League tournament. However our main goal as a team is to take on our biggest rival, UNH, at the NECVL championships," Fasani said.
UNH, last year's division two champions in volleyball, has been the only team able to tarnish Dartmouth's otherwise spotless record this season, beating the Big Green in a close contest early in the year.
While a rematch against UNH in the all-important NECVL championships is high on the minds of the players, the team already has plans for the big show -- the NIRSL Club National Championships in Toledo, Ohio in mid-March.
Until then, the coachless, unfunded and unrecognized spikers will continue to work at what they have done best all year -- overwhelming the competition.
That is exactly what the Big Green will look to do this Sunday when they travel to Maine to take on the University of New England. That match will be the team's last match until April 5.
