Hayley Dotseth, South Dakota Coyotes ready for Summit League volleyball tournament

VERMILLION – The South Dakota volleyball team is headed to the Summit League postseason tournament in search of an automatic NCAA bid.

That much is not news in the five years Leanne Williamson has coached the team. Nor is it news to Hayley Dotseth, the Coyotes’ senior outside hitter who led the Coyotes to a 13-3 Summit League record and the second-seed in this weekend’s conference tournament.

Seniors leave, freshmen arrive, and the Coyotes remain near the top of the Summit League. That’s how it works for a program that has established itself as a perennial contender for a conference title.

Dotseth was named the Summit League player of the year on Thursday and junior Anne Rasmussen was named defensive player of the year. Senior Taylor Wilson was named to the first team and redshirt freshman Madison Jurgens was named to the all-freshman team.

Obviously Denver has been a steady obstacle in pursuit of an NCAA berth to this point within the Summit, but the Coyotes remain a threat to break through. 

Dotseth leads the Summit League in kills per set and Wilson leads in kill percentage for the Coyotes, who are 95-55 under Williamson with a 55-22 mark in the Summit.

“We’ve grown a lot through the season,” said Dotseth, a native of Johnston, Iowa. “We have kind of a big freshman class…there was a big learning curve. The upperclassmen had to step up earlier in the season to bring them along.”

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Now 19-9 overall headed into the tournament in Denver, the Coyotes’ record includes a five-match losing streak that started in Arkansas and ended in Bakersfield, Calif. The next week they began conference play and quickly ran off four wins in a row.

It was a stretch that made them tougher mentally, something they’ll need as they venture to Denver, where the top-seeded Pioneers defeated the Coyotes 3-2 in a memorable match on Oct. 30.

“The growth we’ve seen from the beginning to the end is actually pretty remarkable,” Williamson said. “We knew as a coaching staff and we actually talked about it with them in the preseason that they’re going to have to really trust the process this year and understand that not everything is going to come easy for us.”

The coaches were right about that part, though sorting through a lot of issues prior to the conference season made the growth process more tolerable.

“That’s where we did a lot of the learning,” said Dotseth, the team leader in kills. “That really pushed us forward in the conference play. Since then we’ve pretty continued to get better every match.”

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That has been true over the long haul for the Coyotes, who were competitive very quickly in Summit play under previous coach Matt Houk, now an assistant at Minnesota, and kept it up for Williamson, who was a USD assistant prior to become the head coach.

The competitiveness has been maintained by continuing to get players like Dotseth, who will graduate as a two-time All-Summit League player, into the program.

“Hayley is a special person,” Williamson said. “She cares a great deal, she’s very competitive. She wants to be the best player she can be and she wants to be a good leader and she wants to help the team anyway she can. And she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get to that point…She does her job and she does it at a very high level day-in and day-out.”

The Coyotes will open play in Denver on Saturday night vs. the winner of Friday’s North Dakota State-Omaha match. The winner advances to Sunday’s final at 3 p.m. The quarterfinals and semifinals matches will be streamed free of charge on the Summit League's official website: www.thesummitleague.org. The championship final match will be streamed on Altitude TV and ESPN3.

“As a coaching staff we help set the expectations,” Williamson said. “We help lead the charge but if you’re recruiting the right kids and you’re recruiting kids who have your same beliefs and philosophies and really buy into what you’re trying to do as a program, it doesn’t come easy exactly, but it leads itself. We’ve got the right leaders in the locker room saying the right things.”