Leish was seeing her first career playing time.
As she ran from the end of the bench past the coaches, she threw the candy on the ground, and the coaches and players on the bench started bending over laughing.
When IU Coach Sherry Dunbar-Kruzan called Leish into the game with just a few points remaining and the game already in hand for the Hoosiers, the freshman was so nervous her hand was shaking, but she recorded the match-winning kill anyway.
The win for IU (6-0) marked its second straight Invitational sweep.
The Hoosiers defeated Miami (Ohio), Southeast Missouri State and Mississippi State during the weekend amid extreme heat Friday night and an emergency change of venue for Saturday’s games.
But Dunbar-Kruzan said she’ll remember Leish throwing Kit Kat bars out of her spandex shorts for a long time.
“They have candy and stuff on the bench for a little energy boost during timeouts,” Dunbar-Kruzan said while laughing after the match. “Why she keeps them in her pants, I have no idea.”
Getting Kit Kats out of shorts wasn’t the worst adversity IU faced this weekend.
Friday, against Miami, the hot temperatures caused players to cramp and sweat so profusely that the floor had to be wiped down after every couple points to wipe the players’ sweat off the court.
“It was like a sauna,” senior Moran Leach, who was named MVP of the Indiana Invitational, said of University Gym’s temperature.
IU went on to beat Miami. The extreme heat wasn’t the result of a broken air conditioner, though.
Sophomore defensive specialist Taylor Lebo said since the University Gym is an older building and the roof is metal, it’s a good conductor for heat.
The high temperature Friday reached 88 degrees, and it was sunny most of the day.
Add the heat from the outside hitting the metal roof and the 1,116 people who attended, and the tightly packed University Gym became a heat box by game time, which was 7 p.m.
The team had ice packs on the bench to try and cool the players down during timeouts.
“It was cold in there at 2:30,” Leach said. “But there were so many people in there, it just got really, really hot.”
Saturday, IU was scheduled to play two games in University Gym, one at noon and the other at 7 p.m.
But then the lights went out in University Gym.
The power remained out for about 30 minutes before coming back on. But even though the power was back, Dunbar-Kruzan was wary of continuing to play in University Gym.
She and her coaching staff were worried about the potential of the power going out again.
So Dunbar-Kruzan and the event management staff decided to have the rest of the Invitational in Assembly Hall.
There was some shuffling around they had to do because the basketball team was supposed to practice Saturday in Assembly Hall, but eventually the details got resolved.
So all four teams packed up their stuff and headed west to finish the Invitational in Assembly Hall.
Leach, the team’s lone senior, had never played in Assembly Hall before. The year before she came to IU, they stopped the tradition of playing a game at Assembly Hall each year before the annual Hoosier Hysteria event.
The team said playing in Assembly Hall isn’t ideal.
University Gym is much smaller, so the noise gets trapped. One thousand people can feel like 8,000 people, Leach said.
But in Assembly Hall, the arena is much bigger and the noise dissipates.
For Saturday night’s game against ?Mississippi State, despite the last-minute change of venue, 804 people attended.
“You put that crowd in U-Gym, you can’t hear anything,” Dunbar-Kruzan said.
Still, Dunbar-Kruzan told her team to take advantage of the opportunity to play in the historic arena.
“I told them, this is once in your career you’re going to step on the Assembly Hall court and play volleyball,” she said. “That’s a really neat memory they’re going to have.”
With the Invitational sweep, IU is 6-0 to start the season, with already two-thirds as many wins as it had last season when it went just 9-22.
This is the first time since 2010 IU has started 6-0, the year it made a run to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament.
“We know the potential we have as a team,” Leach said. “If we play the way we want to, we have the potential to get there.”
