A dream came true this weekend for one Mississippi State University volleyball player.
On Friday night, seconds after her team defeated Auburn in a come-from-behind win in five games, Hilary Chambers received a huge surprise as her boyfriend proposed to her at mid-court. She said yes.
“I had no idea he was even in town,” said Chambers. “Much less that he would go so far to make this so perfect. We won the game and I got engaged. This is without a doubt the best day of my life.”
Careful planning that began before the season started led to the success. Senior libero Tanika Taylor knew about it in June, while head coach Brenda Bowlin found out in September.
“It was a tough secret to keep,” said Taylor. “We didn’t tell the rest of the team until Thursday, because there are so many people on this team who can’t keep secrets.”
“We’ve kept a pretty tight lid on this,” said Bowlin. “Other than lining up someone to be in the camera booth and things like that, no one really found out. It was just great.”
Lost in all the emotion was the fact that the Bulldogs had tallied their second SEC win of the year and their first conference win at home.
Auburn took game one of the match 30-26, but the Bulldogs refused to quit. The team rallied to take the next two games by a total of 12 points, and had a chance to end the match in the fourth game before Auburn edged out the Dawgs for a 30-26 victory.
This set up the deciding fifth game. MSU stumbled out of the gate and trailed 6-1. However, the Dawgs showed they still had gas by rallying to defeat to Tigers in a nail-biting 15-13 decision.
“When we got down 6-1, we called a timeout,” Bowlin recalled. “Basically we just said, ‘This is not over.’ The team did a great job of responding, and refusing to lose. This was an emotional game, and a great team win.”
Rachel Cooper paced the Bulldog offense with 20 kills, while Chambers locked up the defense with nine total blocks.
“This was the most emotional game I’ve ever played,” said Chambers. “Even more than the LSU game because of the way we had to fight back to win this one.”
After the emotional win on Friday, the Bulldogs faced a tough challenge on Sunday in the form of the Alabama Crimson Tide. The Tide entered the game third in the conference with eight SEC wins.
The Bulldogs played the Tide tough through the first game before eventually falling 30-27. After that, the talent of Alabama broke the contest wide open. Despite a 10-kill offensive effort by Nicole Broome, and a 20-dig game for Taylor, the Bulldogs lost the final two games of the match by a 30-21 margin.
“We played well in the first game,” Bowlin said. “But I was not pleased with our performance in the second and third games. We had technical breakdowns in all phases of the game.”
Bowlin said the loss came more from Alabama’s play than from any emotional letdown the team might have had.
“Alabama is a very good team. Their outside hitters are very physical, and they just showed up to play. We felt like whatever we did, we couldn’t stop them.”
Taylor credited the loss more to a mental breakdown by the Bulldogs.
“We were up and down the whole match,” Taylor said. “We were on fire in the first game, but it was just downhill from there. We were making a lot of mental errors, and overall we just weren’t playing focused enough to win.”
The Bulldogs will close out the 2003 season with home matches tomorrow against Mississippi and Friday versus Tennessee. Both will begin at 7 p.m.