Wednesday Musings

No West Region matches today or tomorrow so I thought I would empty my notebook.

The championship sites for 2022-03 through 2025-06 will be selected in late 2020 but the NCAA is conducting a hosting seminar in a week to provide information to those interested. The 2019 championship will be held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa with the 2020 event to be held in St. Louis, Missouri.

I had thought my daughter’s wedding wasn’t going to impact volleyball too much this season but I just now realized she’s getting married on Championship Saturday. If a West Region team makes it that far I’m going to be a little sad to miss the wedding.

One of my preseason All-Region picks was Jaci Chambers of TLU as she’s had some of the top defensive statistics the last two years from the libero position. Week one I noticed that she had lost her job to a freshman, which seemed really strange to me. I went back and watched a bit of their match last night to finally realize she’s been moved to setter. You do whatever the team needs even if you are a senior and one of the top players at your position.

I mentioned in the Weekly Wrap-Up that Haleigh Evans (UMHB) didn’t play during a really important weekend of matches. She also didn’t play last night when the coach emptied the bench against Howard Payne. Now I see she’s been removed from the roster. Evans was one of the top liberos in the ASC last season.

I was watching a bit of the Transylvania / UMHB match and noticed the Transy coach complaining about a number of things. I kept going back to see what she didn’t like and was at a loss. One example was the middle blocking an overpass and directing the ball to the side. I assume she wanted a lift? Another was a set that seemed decent but didn’t make it to the pin so I assume it looked bad to her? It reminded me of a note I had from last weekend when Whittier had to swap out their libero jersey because the number didn’t contrast enough with the primary color. I believe they had a contrasting border to separate the number and primary jersey color. I know in USVBA that this has been made into a huge deal in North Texas. Teams are no longer allowed to separate the number color and jersey color by a contrasting border color. They have to be contrasting on their own. I’m sure 9 out of 10 referees wouldn’t care and Whittier may go the entire year without anyone else complaining. Another area where North Texas is focusing on is the double contacts and making that less of a call now. We had the head national referee provide a talk on this last year and she basically said she doesn’t call them unless they are severe. The concept is to let the players do their thing and bad sets only hurt your own team. (Of course, double contacts that go over the net should be enforced as it creates an advantage.) I assume the same message on all of these rule interpretations is given across the country but I also believe each region probably has their own standards. So, going back to the Great Lakes Region (Transylvania), you guys need to loosen up a bit. (And we need to relax on this jersey thing.)

Saw a coach this past weekend stop the match because her libero had dove on the floor to get a ball and her head made contact with the floor. It really didn’t look like anything and the player was fine but I liked the move by the coach to ensure the player’s safety. We’ve come a long way when it comes to concussions with still so much we don’t know about how it impacts people differently. I think I’ve told this story but freshman year for my daughter and Southwestern is going to play Trinity at their gym in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. My daughter is walking with her team and turns her head to talk to someone as they round a corner. Well, Trinity has a number of these trophy cabinets in the hallways and she hits one dead on. She plays the 5-set match with a concussion that no one had any clue about. She was impacted the rest of her freshman year and had to sit out most of the volleyball activities until the summer.

I haven’t figured out if I like being introduced as the “DIII blog guy”, yet.

I know I’ve mentioned in the past how only Washington-St. Louis and Juniata have been in every AVCA Top 25 poll since its inception (1992) but with WUSTL dropping out this week, the streak has been broken for them. Now, only Juniata can stake that claim.

Pet peeve #73:  It drives me crazy when someone dinks over a block and the ball goes up a few feet before going over. The goal is to get the ball to the floor as fast as you can.

Pet Peeve #74:  It drives me crazy when teams can’t pick up a dink that goes up a few feet over the block before coming down on their side.

Congratulations to the Berry Vikings for making the Top 5 for the first time in their history. I think in a past musing post I wondered if you would be better off taking one of the defending champions in our sport to win it all this year or one of the 400+ other teams that have yet to win it. If you took the latter, Berry is your best bet right now. (Side note – It’s just good for our sport when more teams join that elite level. You never know when a WUSTL will have an off year.)

I’m going to put out the last installment of my West Region Tournament Schedule tomorrow and then we’ll have Match Days from Friday to Wednesday as next Thursday is the only off day for the West next week.

Update – Oh forgot to mention that a couple of people have commented that I must be up all of the time as my Match Day posts get posted at 3 am typically. Well, you see, there is a nifty scheduling feature on the WordPress editor that allows us to specify a time to post the articles. Rest assured I’m sound asleep at 3 am!

Second Update – I got bored and dropped another podcast. Somehow while talking I got annoyed with the New England Region. Not sure why it keeps happening to me. Podcast Page.