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Saturday, Sept 20 Match Day!

Updates: Matches are starting but I’ll be on the beach.

Kean up 2-1 on Salisbury. They are making a name for themselves this season. Oh, the NPI Rankings through yesterday is updated. Here is your current top 10:

Williams has the weakest schedule of the bunch. Whitewater has been bounced. Look at Lynchburg! Best team in the ODAC? What you say W&L? (They are currently battling right now. 1-1.)

Lynchburg with the 5-set win. HUGE for them. W&L with their first loss. Hope beat F&M in 4-sets. Not sure how I can keep Hope out of the Top 25 this week.

Kean downs Salisbury in 4-sets. Kean just has the one loss. They were a little over a point in NPI behind Salisbury prior to this match.

Trinity is going to sweep Berry in their “Welcome to the SAA” match. Definitely putting a stamp on the conference.

The SAA is getting introduced to pod play today. One of the pitfalls is the early match that goes 5-sets that backs up the schedule. Well, Millsaps/Oglethorpe did just that. SU/Sewanee will start at least 45 minutes late.

Trinity gets the weep at their pod. Reagan Whatley and Courtney Pope both with 12 kills. The Tigers are hard to beat if both of those players are going well.

JHU took set one from CNU. Tough group of matches for CNU this weekend. NYU 25-9 over Smith in set one. Volleyball is just weird at times.

This Oglethorpe gym really reflects the lights. I do not like it.

I got to watch the entire SU/Sewanee match. Close the first two sets. SU was able to use the bench in set three. Both Tatum Ahrens and Emily Marks finished with 13 kills. The UCSC/Gallaudet match went to five sets before the bad guys won.

Quality win for JHU over Chris Newport. Took the Captains down in a sweep. CC wins in 4-sets at Concordia. Austin College and Hendrix are in the 5th set and it’s tied. Watching the end of that one.

I’m torn on the Hendrix jersey’s. Kind of cool but also maybe a red sock got in the laundry?

Centre having a hard time with Rhodes today.

Hendrix gets their first SCAC win in a big Blue Division match with Austin College.

Nationally, Colby takes down MIT in 4-sets. As I say in the comments, good win for Colby but difficult to know what MIT is. Colby will have some great tests the rest of the way. MIT tests are all in NE. Could be against good teams or who knows. It’s the curse of trying to figure out the teams in the NE regions. William Smith sweeps CMU (MIT’s best win) today. It took MIT 5-sets. I guess that means I need to rank William Smith ahead of MIT? Whitewater sweeps GAC in three close sets. There appears to be a gap between teams in the top tier and the next tier. Trying to figure out where that tier starts and stops is difficult.

Back to the West. In that Hendrix match, both Bastos and Brady combined for 31 kills and 23 digs. Oh, and 2 aces but Brady did the work there.

Mary Washington ended up beating UCSC in a C2C match that doesn’t count for conference. I think there is a definite split between CNU and Salisbury and the rest here.

I am a bit stunned by the Rhodes 4-set win over Centre. That’s the first time in 8 matches where Rhodes comes away with the victory. Both Gebhart and Dsamou finished with 16 kills each in this one.

St Thomas with the 4-set win over TLU. TLU is going to take some lumps this year being so young. Alexis Bodunrin doing the job again for the Celts today with 15 kills. Hope sweeps Whittier but the sets were close. Glad the Poets are able to travel and test themselves against top programs.

Virginia Wesleyan moves to 14-0 with a win over Averett. Their schedule just hasn’t been a challenge but that changes next week with Haverford, CNU and Lynchburg. They also have a number of other good matches along the way…just nothing that I’ve been excited by, yet. IWU moves to 10-0 with an easy sweep over Rose-Hulman. They had been undefeated up until this week but played a couple of good teams and now are not. Weird how that works out that way.

Huh. Macalester beat Chicago in 4-sets. North Park is now 14-2 with two wins today. Carroll beat UW-Stevens Point. A tad surprising but it was going to be a close match (ended up going 5 sets). Cortland beat Gettysburg in 4-sets. Good win for them. Edgewood swept North Central who was 10-2 before this match.

I’ve got the JHU/Juniata match on. JHU won the first set. Close in the second.

First set went 31-29 as my reporter in the field mentioned in the comments. Second set is now tied at 23. JC has their band there. Always cool when the band plays at a volleyball match.

Something that seems to be common on FloSports is the mismatching of sound and video. This match is strange because the gym announcer is on time but the sound of the game is early. In other news, the defense on both sides is really good. These teams seem like they may be okay. JC with a set point.

26-24…Johns Hopkins as they fought off the JC set point and got one of their own. Simone Adam came to the front row at 24-24 (I think) and got the next two kills. Sometimes volleyball is easy to figure out. Setting Simone Adam with a set on the line is a very easy choice.

The last home loss for Juniata was on November 2, 2019 against Susquehanna. They will need a reverse sweep here to continue that streak.

JC winning set three late but the last time JC was swept at home was my birthday (September 10th) back in 2016. My daughter was still playing then!

24-19 JC. This is within the UTD window. JC gets set three so they avoid the sweep.

The UTD Window is 24-18 specifically. Anything closer to 24 is within it. 24-18 was the score in the Regional Final where Southwestern was up to complete the sweep of UTD but lost the set and were forced to go to a fourth and then a fifth before winning. The (hot) wife and I still use this term when watching volleyball.

Coe has split the first two sets with IWU. Interesting.

Ithaca sweeps Smith. Just when I was ready to bring them back into the mix they lose a couple against good teams.

Pretty convincing set by Johns Hopkins this time around. Up 23-12 right now trying to close it out. Rankings will be fun. 25-12 as an ace finishes off the Eagles. Second loss of the year for Juniata.

Gallaudet takes down Whittier in four. Tough day for the Poets.

LETU avoids conference play and takes out two opponents for a clean day. Nicely done.

Well, IWU did not take well to having a set won against them. The last two ended in the favor 14 and 15.

In other news, a number of upsets occurred tonight, which means La Verne is the smartest team in the nation by avoiding this weekend. St Olaf, a team I really liked in the preseason swept Whitewater. That’s their second loss of the weekend. Northwestern, which I thought would struggle a bit and did just that at the recent Trinity Tournament upset Oshkosh in 5-sets. Couple that with W&L losing and Juniata, that’s a big ranking problem to deal with tomorrow and Monday.

In bigger news, Ozarks gets their first SCAC win in their history and now lead the conference. They took down Dallas at home in 5-sets.

Who the heck annoyed Trinity? They handled Centre in three tonight. I mean I’m the one that usually annoys them but this time it wasn’t me.

The NWC matches have started. All of them are pretty close in the first set. Willamette actually leads Whitworth.

Back from the fire show. Very impressive. Leading in the NWC is Puget Sound. And that’s it. Everyone else is 1-1. UPS looks like they will sweep Lewis & Clark.

Last update for the night. The NWC games are being annoying. Puget Sound gets the sweep but no one else. It does look like PLU is going to beat GFU…whoops…they just did. In four sets. Whitworth is about to close out Willamette in four. Whitman and Pacific might go five. Whitman up 2-1 but Pacific leading in the fourth set. Use the links.

Next morning. No surprises in the NWC. PLU, Puget Sound and Whitworth look to be the top 3 in some order this year (again). The fourth is up for grabs.

West Schedule:

3:30 pmRegent 3 JWU (NC) 0

6 pm Dallas 2 Ozarks 3 Southwestern 3 Oglethorpe 0

Hope vs Franklin & Marshall 9 am – Hope trying to get ranked by me again. A win here will probably do it. F&M needs a quality win.

Wash & Lee at Lynchburg 10 am – ODAC match and a big one. Both teams rolling so far this season.

NYU vs Smith 11:45 am – Smith making a push to get ranked again. Of course, this would also help NYU to get back in my rankings.

Colby at MIT 1 pm – Two NE powers throwing down. I love that someone has to lose here. (That was a joke!)

William Smith at Carnegie Mellon 2 pm – This would also put William Smith on the map with my rankings and the AVCA.

Gustavus Adolphus vs UW-Whitewater 2 pm – One loss between them as of Thursday. Both teams ranked. Big NPI points out there for the winner.

Johns Hopkins at Juniata 4 pm – This was looking like an important match in the streak but that’s not to be. Still, huge NPI match for the winner.

Coe at IWU 4 pm – IWU should win but Coe could surprise here.

Smith at Ithaca 4:15 pm – A chance for Smith to really lay claim to an at-large spot with both matches today. Love the schedule from them. No telling from Ithaca but they should win.

I thought about putting the Rose-Hulman/IWU match here but I just think IWU will cruise. A number of others that were close to making it.

Random Thoughts:

Back to the format from last year. I’ve got our West schedule and then the national matches. Update back on top. I won’t duplicate a West “big” match in the National portion. Just FYI.

No ASC matches today.

In the C2C, Mary Washington is at the Gallaudet Tournament. They get both Mount Union and UCSC today. Just so much struggle for MW this season. Salisbury gets Kean at their tournament and this should be a good one. These teams are within a point in NPI as of Thursday. UCSC also gets host Gallaudet today. Both of these matches should be tough. Gallaudet will be the tougher of the two. CNU will get Johns Hopkins today in another match where you have two good NPI schools wanting that QWB.

In the NWC, we get the reverse match today. I think Willamette/Whitworth is probably the best of the four matches. Whitworth should still win this one. George Fox and PLU go at it and this is a chance to stake a claim to one of the Top 4 spots in their conference tournament.

We have pod play in the SAA. Oglethorpe and Trinity host four schools each and each team plays three matches. I believe everyone gets two today and one on Sunday. Berry/Trinity may be the best and it goes off at 11 am. My Pirates get both Sewanee and Oglethorpe today. I’m hoping for less stressful matches then what they’ve given me this season. Trinity also gets Centre today in anther top match. Trinity starting off with maybe the other top two teams in conference.

SCAC has 7 matches today. (8 are listed but one is a duplicate for Concordia where someone got Colorado College’s name wrong.) Can we start off with Dallas at Ozarks? This will be Ozarks first conference match in DIII history. You should tune in just to see the balls bounce off the ceiling. Austin/Hendrix is a big match in the Blue Division. McMurry/Schreiner is fun because those two teams are moving to the ASC next season. Maybe they can compare the payout they received from the conference to switch? LeTourneau plays Belhaven and La Grange in non-conference matches.

The SCIAC is not playing conference this week, but we finish up a couple of tournaments. Pomona-Pitzer won two yesterday but today get Transylvania. Tough match but winnable. Whittier plays both Hope and Gallaudet today. They’ve looked good. Big tests! Oxy has LIFE Pacific in a non-DIII match.

 
 
 

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