Friday Musings (Updated)

Caltech announced their recruits and they actually have two students from out of the country coming in to play volleyball. (And study, I think. Joke.) Welcome to Giulia Murgia who is from Istituto di Istruzione Superiore G.Asproni, Iglesias, Italy and to Olivia Xu who is from Markham, Ontario, Canada. I don’t think I’ve seen any other foreign recruits this year.

I’m confident I don’t have all of the recruits found this year (although I did pretty good) but I thought I’d see where most are coming from into our region. Not surprising, Texas leads with 107 recruits. California comes in next with 39 recruits. We then have Washington with 19 and Oregon with 17. The states in the single digits are Colorado (6), Hawaii (6), Idaho (2), New Mexico (2) and Arizona (2). States with a single recruit are Nevada, Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana and Montana. My apologies if I missed a state.

In the past, I’ve tracked “early retirement” of players and I may do that as more rosters gets released. (These are players that leave the program prior to graduation.) I did a spot check of the top teams and most don’t have their 2022 rosters out and those that do aren’t losing players that contributed heavily in 2021. There is one exception and that’s UT-Dallas. They are losing 5 players that contributed nearly 600 points. They are also losing their top setter. As a reminder, they didn’t have any true seniors so that was their statistics loss for the year.

Going from bummer news for UT-Dallas to good news and it was announced that Zach Villarreal has been “upgraded” from interim head coach to head coach. Zach has been with the program since it was started and he’ll do great with the program moving forward.

I shouldn’t do this because I’m going to gloss over a bunch but here were some of the assistant coaches coming into the region. Izzy Valentine (former player) is joining Lewis & Clark. Allison Kuster doesn’t count at ETBU because she came over from LETU with Coach Matthews. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. Nick Williams (who is married to new head coach Alison Williams) joins LeTourneau. Why does LETU count and ETBU doesn’t? Yeah, the rules are strange. UT-Dallas doesn’t list an assistant. Zach, I can’t do the job. I’m too busy. Please find someone else. Savannah Cox (Pacific) isn’t new but I’m going to mention her because she’s one of my favorites. She said I could sit on the bench if I attend a Pacific match. (I am easily bought.) Morgan Coberly (CMS) also isn’t new but he says the same things over and over so it just seems like it. Giggle. Yeah, this segment is breaking down, but in fairness to me, you head coaches are not doing proper bios of your assistants. Ally Lanik (St Thomas) has to be new because she just stopped playing. Jordan Pickett will be new to Southwestern and thoughts and prayers have to go out to her because she soon has to meet me in person and pretend to like me. I really want to also make fun of Brad Bulyck (Trinity) because he’s been there forever but with a last name like that, what else could I add to make him feel bad? Tons of new graduate assistants, volunteer assistants and student assistants, too. Good luck to all.

Update – Lanik isn’t Lanik. She’s Lanik’s sister and isn’t new. Sigh.

I did see a number of teams with no assistants (other than UTD) so I figure there are more to come.

On the left side menu, you might see something called NCAA Tournament Brackets. This was my attempt to recreate the brackets from every NCAA DIII Volleyball Tournament ever held. In the process, I noticed that the official NCAA site is losing bracket history every year. I only went to 2014 and then linked to the NCAA site but they have now lost 2015 through 2017. Of course, two of those years were won by West Region teams. Go figure. I reached out to the NCAA to see if these could be restored but I received no answer back. Feel free to do the same at NCAASupport@turner.com. I guess if they refuse to restore the data, I’ll have to add to my historical work.

Back in December I was working on an article on NCAA Tournament selection with a specific focus on the criteria. I also wanted some behind the scene information on how the committees operate. I reached out to a number of coaches that had served on the committees in the past and got a few responses. I need to revisit that work and get it on the site. As you can imagine, current RAC members were not forthcoming of information as the NCAA doesn’t like this information to get out. One of the main problems with at-large selection is the secrecy behind the process. I’d like to pull the curtain back a bit on the process. So, if you have ever worked on the RAC and you’d like to help, please reach out to me. I don’t name names.

Do you know one of the best links in DIII volleyball is here. It’s from Ricky’s site and it’s a list of all of the DIII conferences with teams and links to those teams. He even attempts to update it from time to time. But, if you ever see a team that you don’t know, this is the easy place to find out about them.

Finally, I love English soccer. Other than Dermot (CMS dad), I’m not sure if there are many out there that agree. Premier Fantasy Soccer Football starts up next week so I created a D3VbWest league on their site. You can join the league by going to this link. You’ll need an account. Everything is free but you can see how you rank against other readers of the site (and me). Unfortunately, the team I primarily follow is Queens Park Rangers (QPR) and they are in the second division, which is strangely called “Championship”. They are a team from London and I got the chance to see them in person back in 2020 (right before all heck broke loose). Anyway, jump on and pick your team filled with Fulham, Forest and Brighton players.

Update – Ricky has his preseason Top 10 out. You can find it here.