DENVER – It's Mines week for the No. 6 MSU Denver volleyball team.
 
Time to rekindle that rivalry with the neighborhood nemesis.
 
Wait.
 
It's not Colorado School of Mines that's 10-6 overall and tied for fourth in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference at 4-2?
 
Nope.
 
It's upstart South Dakota Mines – and not the 11^th-place team from Golden, Colo. – that has come up, well, golden, thus far in 2023.
 
"They are really solid," MSU Denver coach Jenny Glenn said. "They have some decent size from a blocking standpoint, and they have some offensive weapons. They are just solid in every department – no major weaknesses."
 
The South Dakota Mines match is Saturday at 3 p.m., in Rapid City, S.D.
 
But don't think the Roadrunners are looking past their Friday night opponent.
 
Because even though Black Hills State, which plays host to MSU Denver at 6 p.m. in Spearfish, S.D., is 5-11 overall and 0-6 in league play, one of its wins was a non-conference victory over South Dakota Mines.
 
"They've been changing their lineup, and they have a lot of different style of attackers for us to prepare for," Glenn said. "We'll need to know who is on the other side of the net. It will be a match where we'll have to make adjustments based on personnel and the flow of the match."
 
With a chance of snow in western South Dakota over the weekend, that's another factor that could make extracting victories difficult.
 
"This trip is always a tough one from the standpoint of distance, and both teams usually have good home crowds, which makes it tougher to play there," Glenn said. "And now, factoring in weather, it creates the potential for shifting our travel plans. But that would be good for us to get used to adjusting on the fly when things don't go exactly as we planned them."
 
The Roadrunners have executed a well-developed plan to get in some down time over the past two weeks, having played only one match – an easy sweep over New Mexico Highlands – in the 13 days leading up to Friday's match.
 
"We've had two two-day weekends, and we utilized those days to rest and recover a bit," Glenn said. "Our bodies are holding up pretty well, and when we've been in the gym we're getting the intricacies of our game better while trying to be constantly evolving as the season progresses and staying unpredictable. The girls are working hard to bring some weaknesses up as well as continuing to develop our strengths."
 
Getting in plenty of work has been the Roadrunners' impressive five-player freshman class.
 
"Our freshmen continue to bring energy to the practice gym," Glenn said. "They are making it competitive. Our starters are having to work really hard to win in practice, and that's a good thing. And it's mostly playing against our freshman unit."