Scheduling Issues

I had been hearing that schools were still having some difficulties scheduling for the fall 2021 season so I thought I would reach out to some coaches to see where they are at and whether they had experienced any unique issues. I certainly can understand how this upcoming season would prove difficult in scheduling. There was that pandemic thing that we’d all like to think is gone but is still causing issues when you look across the sporting landscape. There are the financial considerations with athletic budgets where you’d have to imagine schools really don’t know what their 2021 numbers will look like even now. You have concerns over travel and, to be honest, there are probably some schools still wondering if they will even play this fall. For those schools that played in the spring, you have the issue of the short turnaround between the spring and fall season this year. I recently looked at the West Region programs to see what schedules had been released and there were less than half out there. I think some of the missing schedules are probably due to open dates that they hope get filled in the next couple weeks. So, yeah, understandable that coaches would be having problems with the fall 2021 schedule.

Not mentioned above, but a unique factor impacting the ASC schools in scheduling was the change to their conference format. In a recent article I mentioned their switch to a 10-team conference with round robin play, but I didn’t go in depth on how this negatively effects their scheduling. The problem is with this 10-team conference playing round robin it means 18 matches have to be played over 9 weeks and the schools are very spread out. If schools don’t play at least 3 matches in a week at times then the entire volleyball season could be taken up by just conference play. If we look at the ETBU schedule, they are currently only playing one non-conference weekend with the rest of the time devoted to conference play. This is despite the fact they play a number of three match weeks during the season. HSU is another ASC school that looks to only be playing one non-conference weekend at this time. I can certainly understand how the change to the ASC format combined with playing in the spring hampered the scheduling for these programs. Remembering that I made a promise to be kind to everyone when it came to scheduling in the fall, I will say that the ASC schools will need to figure this out for 2022 as one non-conference weekend is simply not enough. It’s a problem that plagues the NWC and it’s the reason they are the only DIII conference in the nation that doesn’t play a tournament (although rumor has it there is some progress being made to change this fact).

When checking with a number of coaches, it became clear that the earlier a school could schedule the better things turned out for them. By earlier, I mean last fall into the beginning of this year. Think about all of the uncertainty surrounding the volleyball programs around that time and it’s easy to understand why most schools couldn’t do this. One coach said there were a lot of handshake deals during the pandemic as far as tournaments go at the same time the aggressive programs were putting together multiple schedules prior to getting their administration’s approval. This allowed them to lock down their preferred schedule once the approval came.

UT-Dallas Head Coach Marci Allison talked about the difficulty of the ASC format and the importance of committing early to a tournament, “With regard to scheduling, yes it has been interesting but not only because of the pandemic but because our conference designed our schedule leaving very few dates to play outside of our conference. I jumped on Wash U opening weekend right away for many reasons (strength of schedule, [ability to] drive or fly, and playoff potential). We [then] created a tournament with Southwestern around a conference game September 10th bringing in Aurora and Carnegie Mellon to help everyone out.”

One tournament that I know is struggling for teams is the Oregon Trail Classic (September 11). It’s an important tournament for the NWC programs as most can only take one trip so bringing in quality opponents really can make or break their season from a Strength of Schedule (SOS) standpoint. Right now, it seems that the NWC schools will travel down to California but getting return trips is almost impossible. The Puget Sound Premiere (September 4) has Southwestern flying in but it’s possible that they will be the only non-NWC school playing, which is very unusually for this tournament.

Pacific Head Coach Kip Yoshimura said, “[It’s been] very difficult scheduling. Many teams were still in the middle of their Covid season when email and calls were going around.”

Coach Yoshimura also mentioned that unknown budgets for the 2021-22 season also hurt scheduling.

PLU Head Coach Kevin Aoki added, “I think teams are more cautious about visiting.”

I checked on the Pacific Coast Classic hosted by La Verne, CMS and Pomona-Pitzer and the word back was that they didn’t have an issue getting in teams.

Pomona-Pitzer Head Coach Valerie Townsend said, “Our tournament filled up very quickly – many teams from out of the area committed pretty quickly.”

It’s hard to know how much the pandemic played in the differences between these tournaments. I think CMS, national champions in 2017, helps bring in teams as does the fact it’s Southern California. Out of the Oregon and Washington schools, PLU has a good reputation but I think volleyball programs like Puget Sound, Pacific, George Fox and Lewis & Clark reputations haven’t caught up with how good they are (or will be) this fall.

As far as hesitancy to travel, there were two coaches that touched on this topic. Coach Townsend mentioned that they weren’t really looking to travel (fly) and wanted to “keep it low key” this season. Mary Hardin-Baylor Head Coach Mark Pryor said they were allowed to travel (fly) but decided against it this season. He added, “Our team and staff just decided that it was not worth it to deal with all the current issues of flying.”

Frankly, when a defending West Region conference champion decides not to travel (fly) then there are going to be issues filling up tournaments. This is a team that in normal seasons would need to take those flights in order to build up their SOS. They aren’t the only team in the nation that feels there are more important issues at hand than SOS this upcoming season.

On the flip side, we still have teams like Trinity that will have a very experienced team looking to make another deep run in the NCAA Tournament. They will be playing one of the more impressive schedules I’ve seen in quite some time. It includes two out-of-conference trips with opponents like Emory, Cal Lu, CMS and four of the top programs out of New England in Wellesley, Babson, MIT and Tufts. This doesn’t include quality programs coming to their two tournaments and the always tough SCAC schedule. There doesn’t appear to have been any scheduling issues for the Tigers.

So, where does that leave us? There were (and still are) problems filling up tournaments and part of that issue was the reduced travel by some teams. Top flight programs, however, seem to have come out of it fine with the squeeze seeming to impact the programs in the middle, as it were. A number of coaches did comment that they are still seeing “email blasts” from programs looking for opponents and tournaments looking for teams. That means not all schedules are finalized and we will see fewer matches played by some programs. Going back to the ETBU schedule and I only count 23 matches. In the past three years they have averaged 30 matches per year. UMHB has 24 matches on the schedule and they typically play more than 30 matches per year. We may also see the Texas teams play more NAIA schools this year than normal in order to increase the number of matches. Austin College typically plays one of the more packed schedules every year so I expect to see a lot of NAIA schools on their schedule if they want to approach the same number of matches as in previous years. In the end, the pandemic is still a player and still impacting negatively our sport. Hopefully, scheduling will be the last impact we feel and things will be as close to normal this fall season as possible and we’ll see “normal” schedules in 2022.