When players come out to the court with confidence, they usually draw from the success they have had in the past.

After five straight losses and a 0-4 start to the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Syracuse players seem to be struggling to play with any confidence.

“If you’re not winning,” head coach Leonid Yelin said, “how are you going to have confidence?”

Making it that much more disappointing is that all four of these losses came at home. To get its first ACC wins of the year this weekend, the Orange (5-11, 0-4 ACC) will need to win on the road against Virginia (9-7, 2-2) at 7 p.m. on Friday or Virginia Tech (14-2, 2-2) at 1 p.m. on Sunday.

After its matchup against undefeated North Carolina on Friday night, it seemed the Orange would be able to draw confidence from being able to compete and almost win sets against one of the top teams in the country.

Instead, against a solid but weaker North Carolina State team on Sunday, the team seemed to have not gained any confidence. In fact, the Orange lost confidence in a disappointing four-set loss filled with errors across the board.

“What we’ve tried to do is build confidence in those games where even when we lost we’ve played well,” middle blocker Lindsay McCabe said. “Like Friday, I think we built our confidence good on that. But then again, we brought it down on Sunday so we got to be a little more consistent with that.”

Yelin disagrees that SU’s performance on Friday could give the team confidence going forward. He believes the team needs to actually get the win if the Orange is going to build up any belief in itself.

“They lost,” Yelin said. “So you never believe you can do it. You lost. You don’t even remember what is happened before. You remember what’s happened now. On the end you was going shaking hands. You lost.”

After the game on Sunday, Yelin mentioned outside hitter Silvi Uattara as an embodiment of the mental toughness he feels SU lacks.

After playing so solidly the past weekend and still coming up short, Uattara admits it does get hard to play with confidence when the team doesn’t win, leaving her at a bit of a loss for words.

“Of course it’s hard to step up after so many losing like games,” Uattara said.

Syracuse might not have any recent wins under its belt, but the Orange is still doing what it can to try to improve its confidence leading up to matches.

“I think the best thing that we can do at this point is build confidence in practice so that when we start a game we have it,” McCabe said.

Syracuse hasn’t won a game at home since Sept. 14. As the Orange hits the road for its next four games, a change of scenery could be the spark SU needs for a turnaround.

“We just know there is so many more conference games ahead of us,” freshman setter Erica Handley said. “We’ve played four games (at home). You never know. We can’t give up now. We just got to keep our heads up and keep pushing.”

Published on October 9, 2013 at 11:17 pm

Contact Ryan: rlraigro@syr.edu