Ricky Nelson’s 2014 preseason top 25

My ideas of a preseason top 25 are probably not your ideas of a preseason top 25. While I appreciate the sentiment of rubber-stamping the final 2013 poll, I prefer to flush 2013 and start anew with some risk. Prior performance matters to me insofar the prior performance is relevant in 2014. My top 25 shows my order of teams when they step on the court for the first time this year. I will be flat-out wrong on teams — too high and too low. But I hope those errors will be addressed when I publish my weekly top 10s.

Because I post this so early, I know very few incoming recruiting classes. D-III, especially the fall season, is a crap shoot. At least in winter and spring you have a surer sense of where athletes are enrolled. Volleyball is one of the tougher fall sports to gauge in the early going because freshmen and transfers often play crucial roles.

In previous years I’ve posted my preseason top 10 followed by a laundry list of 20-30 teams (see my preseason polls from 2013, 2012, 2011). Being slightly bolder, here is my 2014 preseason top 25 followed by a laundry list of another 20 teams I wouldn’t mind seeing the AVCA voters recognize. There are several others, but lists have to end somewhere. I agree if you think the laundry list is a crutch, but it’s the preseason and I like quite a few teams this year.

1. Emory 2. Wittenberg 3. Hope 4. St. Thomas 5. Juniata 6. Wisconsin-Whitewater 7. Washington-St. Louis 8. Wisconsin-Stevens Point 9. Calvin 10. Trinity (TX) 11. Saint Benedict 12. Pacific Lutheran 13. Pomona-Pitzer 14. Eastern 15. Mount Union 16. Colorado College 17. Christopher Newport 18. Nebraska Wesleyan 19. Coe 20. Millikin 21. Texas-Dallas 22. Ohio Northern 23. Cal Lutheran 24. Mary Hardin-Baylor 25. DePauw

Next 20 (in no particular order): Claremont-Mudd-Scripps; Bethany; UMass-Boston; Webster; Elmhurst; Clarkson; Williams; Otterbein; Stevenson; Augsburg; Thomas More; Randolph-Macon; Concordia-Moorhead; Susquehanna; Carthage; Cornell; Franklin & Marshall; Chicago; UC Santa Cruz; Southwestern.

Pretty wrong, right? I agree, there are some that stick out to me too. We’ll see.

-Ricky Nelson