Saturday Musings

I went looking for the Championship Meeting notes and failed. They still haven’t been posted. I do have a few notes worth mentioning if you’ve got 5 minutes.

I heard from someone in the know at Trinity that after the basketball season is completed, the floor will be replaced in the Caalgard Gymnasium. It will forever be called the Julie Jenkins Court. A nice honor for their longtime Head Volleyball Coach who has over 1100 wins at the NCAA level with most of them coming at Trinity. Of course, this will now allow everyone to walk on and over Julie, which I don’t think has ever happened before.

We have head coach openings at UC Santa Cruz, Linfield and Dallas. I still see the UCSC job posted but not the others. Linfield still lists Lacey Bell as their coach.

I didn’t mention Pacific who saw Kip Yoshimura step down late last month. That job will be filled by Rachel Renville who was the assistant last year. She is listed as the interim coach, currently. The announcement came on their IG page. Congratulations to Rachel and now I get to add a new coach to bother during the season.

A story I think I missed last year was that Howard Payne is adding Beach Volleyball next spring (2026). They started building an 8,700 square foot outdoor pavilion back in August that will include 3 sand volleyball courts. When looking for the indoor coaching jobs on the NCAA market, I stumbled across the opening for the beach volleyball coach. That would leave only HSU without a Beach Volleyball program in the ASC (of course, they only have 4 members right now). It’s still shocking to me that none of the SoCal teams have Beach Volleyball. That just seems like a fun fit for those schools.

Back to Julie. Did you know that she’s only had one season where her team won less than 10 matches in a season. That was 1988. Yes, that stat includes the COVID year. She’s only had 5 seasons where she’s been under 0.500. All five of those years were in her first 5-years at Trinity. I won’t remember to ask her but I wonder if there was pressure on her year 6 and what those conversations were like with her AD at the time. Her first over 0.500 year at Trinity was 1990 when her team went 28-10. The rest, as they say, is history.

I tweeted this out the other day but Johns Hopkins has announced Bayleigh Braswell to replace Matt Troy at Johns Hopkins. Maybe the best opening in DIII volleyball this spring has been filled. Best of luck to Bayleigh but I’m going to miss Matt.

I saw an article about the Northwest Conference possibly expanding as they currently sit at 9 members (at least for volleyball). There are a number of DII and NAIA schools that they listed. The author did a nice job going through the schools and some of the problems they currently face. Say what you will about the NWC, and some people in the past have said they hate them (how rude), but they have a good thing going. It’s just a shame they exist on an island within another island. (That makes them a recursive island.)

I heard that one of my Southwestern granddaughters is leaving the program. I’m very sad about that and she will be greatly missed. Injuries suck.

I had a coach send me the players from our region currently in the transfer portal. Saw one from Howard Payne, one from ETBU, 3 from Mary Hardin-Baylor, 4 from Redlands, 1 from Dallas and the one mentioned above for Southwestern.

I’m always a little surprised over the DIII transfers. I certainly can understand it when a coach changes or homesickness happens but my old man take on it is that students need to be looking for the academic fit first. If they find that then the amount of court time shouldn’t matter as much. It just feels like DIII is picking up some bad DI traits. Again, I’m old and this is probably a bad viewpoint on it. Overall, I do think everyone deserves to be happy and if transferring leads to that then I’m on board. I do wonder how my daughter would have looked at in this climate. She loved Southwestern for a number of different reasons but her playing time fluctuated over the years and we did have a coaching change her senior year. I’m just thankful she stuck it out and things worked out for her in the end. College can be great for most people but what matters is what comes next and it’s the academics that makes that happen.

I’m going to end with some non-volleyball news. The Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Dončić a week ago and this news hurt my and the (hot) wife’s sports heart to its core. Just an absolute crazy decision and, from what I can learn, a broken process by the GM, Nico Harrison. It’s hard to be a worse GM than Cowboy’s Jerry Jones (side note…not a Cowboys’ fan), but Nico did it. I can’t imagine what it’s like to show how stupid you are on a national stage. (Thank god this site has a small audience, right?!?) The thing is, and this may be a strange take, I would have taken Luka and no championships for the next 15 years then a championship in that time without him. This is going to hurt for a long time and I will forever blame Nico and the ownership group led by Patrick Dumont who proves dumb people can become rich. Thank you for listening.