Weekly Wrap-Up (10/8/2023)

Have I mentioned that my (hot) wife is a belly dancer? She’s danced her entire life and recently got into this form of dancing. I mention this because she has a performance this afternoon, which will probably delay the publishing of this Weekly Wrap-Up. Of course, you may not care because you are obviously reading this but just think about the fact that I’m actually writing this on Saturday night during the TCU football game. I have no idea how long this is going to take or when I’ll be done. All I know is that tomorrow I have to go to a festival and watch belly dancing. And, by writing “have to go”, I really mean I have to go. I think I’ll be back in time for most of the Texas Rangers game but that’s another thing that may delay this article. Anyway, enough about writing about delays and let me get to this thing.

This past week I published the normal articles; D3VbWest Top 25, AVCA Top 25, Players of the Week and Region Leaders. We had our normal Match Day articles and an extra article on which freshman are contributing right away to their teams. This coming week, we see some scheduling weirdness as we have matches every day except Monday. That includes an unusual Thursday match in the NWC (and SCIAC) and an unusual Sunday match in the ASC. We also have the SCIAC sort of taking Saturday off, which seems strange to me, too. As a reminder, the standings on the left side (or pulldown) has been updated (if I can remember) but won’t include the UC Santa Cruz matches going on today.

Before we get to the conferences, I’ll search my mind for anything of interest. I’ve already blown the belly dancing news so poor planning on my part. For those interested in Decker (our new kitten), he will be 7 weeks tomorrow and will have a very intrusive veterinary appointment. Our existing cat (Dany) still doesn’t like Decker and I’m thinking never will. We’ve got him off the bottle so no more middle of the night feedings. We’ve taken him out of his “pit” and he now has full roam of the house. We are still working on him locating the litter box but once he finds it, he does his business well. Our last battle is that he doesn’t want to drink water from a bowl. Hopefully, he figures that out quickly. (Updated note – He was back in the “pit” last night. He decided the side of the fireplace was his litter box.)

I’ve taken some recent shots at the AVCA on their Player of the Week selections. Here are the schools represented from this year’s selections: UW-Stout, Randolph-Macon, Johns Hopkins, Utica and Nazareth. No issue with Johns Hopkins but I’d be curious on how this selection is done. First off, I consider the AVCA Player of the Week as the premier weekly award in our division. It should go towards someone who played top competition and performed exceptionally. I really don’t care what school they play for but obviously, top schools tend to play top schools early in the season. Anyway, this award seems to be based solely on statistics with no consideration if the teams that were played are good or not. So, to me, this award has become pointless. This is not how the AVCA Player of the Year Award is handled so I’m not sure why it’s done this way weekly. If the AVCA thinks statistics accumulated against Elmira or Alfred (as were done by the last award winner) are at the same level as a Juniata, Hope, UW-Oshkosh, etc. then they really need to get out of the volleyball business.

It’s a bit mind numbing to me how many announcers and color commentators talk about “communication” on these streams. My assumption is that most of you just watch one team’s stream with an occasional stepping out when a big match might be on. I certainly don’t watch a ton of full matches but I do get my share of snippets of a lot of different matches. It just makes me cringe when “communication” gets mentioned. It basically gets blamed when (usually) the home team is losing and they are unable to send the ball over on three contacts. Usually, the reason why the ball didn’t go over is because one or more players messed up and maybe that’s the key to “communication”. You can blame it as opposed to Mary Sue who had a brain fart as she free balled it to the bottom of the net. I’m not advocating calling out players, unless it’s Trinity, but we can acknowledge how a play ended without making stuff up.

Did you know DIII has a self-release form for student-athletes that don’t want to go into the transfer portal (yet) but are considering going to another DIII program? It allows for 30-days of contact between the student-athlete and the new institution and they are not allowed to inform your current institution. I just thought this was an interesting thing that seems to only exist within DIII. My hope, of course, is that everyone picks the right home out of high school but changing homes shouldn’t be made artificially hard so this is a cool option for those that need it.

Some QWI fun for you all since I didn’t do a standalone article on it this week. The Top 5 selection SOS numbers are (this is through last Sunday):

1. Chicago (5-11 Record) 0.679

2. UW-Whitewater (13-2) 0.664

3. WashU (10-5) 0.657

4. NYU (15-2) 0.650

5. Ohio Northern (11-4) 0.650

Everyone but Chicago will probably make the NCAA Tournament although all of Chicago’s 11 losses would be to teams that will most likely be regionally ranked. Two of their five wins are to potential regionally ranked teams. I want to look a Middlebury (a team that jumped out at me) a bit below. Their numbers are 7-4 0.639 SOS 4-4 Ranked Record.

The highest SOS for Region X teams was by Colorado College at 0.608. Cal Lutheran was next at 0.594 and then UT-Dallas at 0.589. The Region X potential regionally ranked teams as determined by QWI were:

1. La Verne

2. Trinity

3. CMS

4. Puget Sound

5. Texas Lutheran

6. UC Santa Cruz

7. Pomona-Pitzer

From that list, Trinity, CMS, TLU and Pomona-Pitzer did well this week. If I look at the teams through my selection criteria glasses:

1. La Verne has a 0.548 SOS but 4-0 against ranked teams. CMS and Pomona-Pitzer changed that this week. With that SOS, they just can’t afford to lose matches.

2. Trinity looks fine although their SOS is 0.579 and only 4 ranked wins.

3. CMS SOS is 0.571 and only 2 ranked wins. They needed that La Verne win.

4. Puget Sound has a surprising 2-0 Ranked Results but a non-starter SOS of 0.508.

5. TLU has a 0-3 Ranked Result. That is problematic.

6. UC Santa Cruz really needed some wins this weekend. Fingers crossed for today. (Editor’s Note – Didn’t help.)

7. Pomona-Pitzer 1-5 Ranked Results so huge La Verne win this week. 0.562 SOS.

ETBU was 12-2 with 1-2 Ranked Results and a 0.546 SOS. Mary Hardin-Baylor’s SOS was 0.435. Yikes.

Middlebury is looking like the classic New England team that doesn’t play anyone but gets an at-large bid because the selection system favors their region. Let’s compare them to this mystery team:

The result of our little selection battle is 2-2 out of the five criteria. In theory, the battle goes to secondary criteria but we would all hope that the selection committee could figure it out with the primary data. Which team do you like? All of the losses are to ranked teams so good on both. Middlebury has played less matches but more against Ranked teams. Do you value the Mystery team’s record less because of that? That Common Opponent result sticks out. Middlebury swept that team while Mystery lost in 5-sets. Without looking deeper, Middlebury has played a much tougher schedule and only lost to the teams ranked while beating a common opponent handily. I certainly could make a strong case for Middlebury.

The Mystery team is Trinity. Here are the 8 potential ranked teams for Middlebury: Kean (L), Gettysburg (L), Cortland (W), Williams (L), Eastern Nazarene (W), Tufts (W), Clarkson

and Rochester (L).

Here are the 7 potential ranked teams for Trinity: UW-Oshkosh (L), Tufts (L), CMS (L), Franklin & Marshall (W), Pomona-Pitzer (W), MIT

and Texas Lutheran (W).

The selection committee in past years have looked at these potentially ranked teams as equal although any sane person would appreciate the difficulty of some of those Trinity opponents. The MIT win is probably the best win of either team. What sticks out to me is that the ceiling of Middlebury is Tufts where that is probably the floor for Trinity. Ceiling/Floor is not a selection criterion.

This weekend may have eliminated UC Santa Cruz and Colorado College from at-large consideration assuming they could get regionally ranked high enough to be considered. Colorado College could only beat UCSC while UCSC has rematches against Chris Newport and Mary Washington today. They lost to both yesterday. They have another tournament at Calvin later this month but I think both of these matches today are must wins. Region X teams with a chance at an at-large? CMS, Trinity (watch out for Middlebury!), La Verne and maybe Texas Lutheran. Two of those four will most likely get the automatic qualifier in their conference. So, best case, six teams out of Region X this season?

To make my belly dancing experience worse, I’ve got Johns Hopkins Head Coach Matt Troy sending me pictures from the Texas/Baltimore game. Jerk.

Alright, time to look at the conferences with regards to their tournaments and some of the top performances of the week.

In the ASC, the top 3 seem to be clear now with ETBU, UMHB and UT-Dallas leading the way. All three teams won their matches this week with ETBU now at 12 straight matches. I think it’s really important to take the top spot because not only do you get to host but you avoid playing both of the other teams in the tournament. LeTourneau and HSU seem to be the next two teams and they could end in either order. The last spot seems to be Howard Payne’s to lose. They just beat Concordia (their most likely challenger) away in 4-sets. The surprise result of the week was probably UT-Dallas’ sweep over HSU away. The win wasn’t the surprise but the sweep was. In fact, the match was actually pretty close as two sets went extras but the Points was still in favor of UT-Dallas 63-48. That’s 21 Points/Set for UT-Dallas so another indication that no one should want to play them in the SCAC Tournament. Performances for the week:

• Morgan Nix (LeTourneau) had 30 digs in their 3-set loss to UT-Dallas.

• Riley Brittain (HPU) had 4 kills, 29 assists and 7 digs in their 3-set loss to UMHB.

• Dravyn Hurd (UMHB) had 7 kills, hit 0.467, 2 aces and 2.5 blocks in their sweep of HPU.

• Emma Sevening and Izzy Sundquist (UTD) had a combined 46 assists in their sweep of HSU.

• Daniella Garcia (Sul Ross State) had 16 kills and hit 0.324 in their 4-set win over Concordia.

• Lillie Hill (ETBU) had 2 aces and 27 digs in their sweep of McMurry.

• Dravyn Hurd (UMHB) had 11 kills, hit 0.500 and 3 blocks in their sweep over HPU.

• Lauren Johnson (UTD) had 10 kills and hit 0.474 in their sweep over McMurry.

• Rylee McAlexander (HPU) had 14 kills, hit 0.464 and 4 blocks in their 4-set win over Concordia.

• Avery Reid (ETBU) had 19 kills, hit 0.342, 4 aces and 10 digs in their 4-set win over HSU.

Nix can’t get the defensive award every week, can she? Hill could repeat, too. Maybe Dravyn Hurd for offensive POW.

I’m writing this before the first UC Santa Cruz match today (Sunday). The team went 0-3 so far on the weekend losing to very good team and this makes 5 straight losses. UCSC scheduled really tough so losses shouldn’t be a surprise but they need to pick off wins where they can so fingers crossed for today.

• Peyton Tazelaar (UCSC) had 12 kills and hit 0.310 in their 4-set loss to Chris Newport.

We do have some intrigue in the NWC as Willamette nocked off Puget Sound to insert themselves back into the conference tournament race. PLU continues to be undefeated at the halfway point and are followed by 2-loss teams George Fox and Whitworth. Puget Sound sits with 3 losses and Willamette is 4-4 in fifth. Only the top 4 get a spot and I’m only comfortable with PLU at this point. Linfield, Whitman, Lewis & Clark and Pacific will need to play the spoiler the rest of the season, I believe. Looking at the Willamette/Puget Sound match, Puget Sound had more Points than Willamette as they won their two sets by large margins. It seemed to be a case of starting too late for the Loggers as they went down 2-0, played great for the next two but dropped the fifth. Here are the top performers for the week:

• Emma Porter (Willamette) had 2 kills, 41 assists and 17 digs in their 5-set win over UPS.

• Ella Jimenez (Whitworth) had 16 kills and hit 0.357 in their sweep over Linfield.

• Piper Harrop (George Fox) had 2 aces and 41 digs in their 4-set loss to PLU.

• Baylee Johnson (PLU) had 15 kills and hit 0.310 in their 4-set win over GFU.

• Olivia Evaro (PLU) had 3 kills and 45 assists in their 4-set win over GFU.

• Emily Strand (L&C) had 10 kills and hit 0.318 in their 5-set win over Pacific.

• Emily Cheavtharn (Pacific) had 52 assists and 23 digs in their 5-set loss to L&C.

• Baylee Johnson (PLU) had 11 kills and hit 0.300 in their sweep over L&C.

• Claire Johnson (Linfield) had 5 kills, hit 0.714 and had 32 assists in their sweep over Whitman.

• Kayla Craft (Pacific) had 16 kills and hit 0.368 in their 5-set loss to UPS.

• Logan Winn (UPS) had 2 kills, 41 assists, 3 aces and 10 digs in their 5-set win over Pacific.

• Kassandra Staton and Addison Robertson (GFU) had 22 kills with only 1 error between them in their sweep over Willamette.

Ella Jimenez or Baylee Johnson would be good choices for offensive POW. Maybe Piper Harrop for defensive?

Just got back from the festival. Rangers are up 5-2 early. Released Decker from the “pit”. I think it’s time to look at the SCAC. I mentioned that the NWC was at the halfway mark but so is the ASC and SCAC with just a few weird exceptions. The SCIAC will reach halfway this week. The first four teams in the standings are very orderly and neat. Trinity, TLU, St Thomas and Colorado College are separated by one match each. We then have the race for the last two spots between three teams that are in a virtual tie (Schreiner has played one less match). Besides Schreiner there is Southwestern and Austin College. Southwestern bounced back from going 0-5 to win three this weekend. Dallas and Centenary are probably only going to play the spoiler the rest of the way. I don’t think we had a surprise match this week in the SCAC but maybe Southwestern/Austin College was the closest based on the way SU had been playing. Southwestern got the 4-set win after a dominate set one only to see the next three be relatively close. SU is still committing way too many errors to be a factor any higher than they are but, at least, they know what they need to fix. I was really impressed with a scrappy Austin College defense and I think this race with them, Southwestern and Schreiner could end up in any order. Top performances from this week:

• Brooke Byer (Schreiner) had 14 kills and 25 digs in their 4-set win against McMurry.

• Tanyse Moehrig (TLU) had 9 kills and hit 0.474 in their sweep of HSU.

• Courtney Pope (Trinity) had 8 kills on 0.471 hitting in their sweep of Concordia.

• Meadow Smith (Centenary) had 4 kills, 0.571 hitting and 32 assists in their sweep of Wiley.

• Cassie Dyoub (Dallas) had 13 kills hitting .357 in their sweep of Dallas Christian.

• Mackenzie Logan (Trinity) had 13 kills, 0.300 hitting and 10 digs in their 4-set win over HSU.

• Tanyse Moehrig (TLU) had 11 kills and hit 0.303 in their sweep of Austin College.

• Laynee Beam (St Thomas) had 11 kills and hit 0.409 in their 4-set win over Centenary.

• Christina Kuras (Southwestern) had 11 kills and an ace in their sweep over Dallas.

• Tanyse Moehrig again (TLU) had 8 kills and hit 0.348 with 5 digs in their sweep over Dallas.

• Christina Kuras (Southwestern) had 11 kills and hit 0.360 in their sweep over Centenary.

• Carolyn Dormady (CC) had 12 kills and hit 0.348 in their sweep over UCSC.

• Geneva Nedrow (Southwestern) had 3 aces and 36 digs in their 4-set win over Austin College.

• Laynee Beam (St Thomas) had 8 kills hitting 0.381 with 2 aces in their 4-set win over Dallas.

• Isabella Lipacis (CC) had 13 kills hitting 0.345 with 3 aces and 9 digs in their 5-set loss to CNU.

• Emily Mixon (TLU) had 11 kills hitting 0.588 in their sweep over Centenary.

A number of players had multiple great performances. Tough call for the SCAC this week for POW. Oh, it’s 9-2 Rangers and Coach Troy has waived the white flag. Too early. Our bullpen is horrible.

I finally get to the SCIAC in the Wrap-Up that has taken about 24 hours to finish. CMS jumped into first by themselves with a big win against La Verne and then the Leopards lost again to Pomona-Pitzer to give CMS breathing room. Both La Verne and Pomona-Pitzer each have 2 losses with the fourth position held now by both Whittier and Cal Lutheran. That CMS/La Verne match was big but that Pomona-Pitzer loss was even bigger because I really think that secures the top spot for CMS. I just don’t think they lose to any other SCIAC team outside of La Verne. Those five teams appear to be the ones in contention for one of the top 4 spots in the SCIAC Tournament. Chapman, Caltech, Redlands and Oxy don’t look to have enough to upset that balance. I was all ready to reuse a lot of what I tweeted out when CMS beat La Verne but then the surprise match had to be the Pomona-Pitzer win over ULV. I will say that the four outsides in that CMS/ULV match were impressive. Looking at the PP/ULV 4-set box score, the Points were pretty even and in ULV’s favor (66-64). The attacking errors was where ULV faltered as they had 37 to PP’s 20. That’s a lot of points to give away. The other stat that jumped out at me was how clean the PP outsides (Gill and Wilson) were in the service receive. ULV was just giving away points and PP wasn’t. Here are the SCIAC top performers for the week:

• Tess Holbert (CLU) had 13 kills hitting 0.667 with 35 assists and 2 aces in their 4-set win over Oxy.

• Paige Mountanos (PP) had 11 kills hitting 0.500 in their sweep of Redlands.

• Georgia McGovern (CMS) had 8 kills hitting 0.462 with 35 assists in their sweep of ULV.

• Jenna Holmes (CMS) had 16 kills hitting 0.389 with 11 digs in their sweep of ULV.

• Mya Ray (ULV) had 15 kills hitting 0.483 with 9 digs in their sweep of Redlands.

• Jenna Holmes (CMS) had 15 kills hitting 0.483 with 9 digs in their sweep of CLU.

• Olivia Sampson (Chapman) had 15 kills hitting 0.344 with 2 aces in their sweep of Caltech.

• Paige Wilson (PP) had 9 kills and 18 digs in their 4-set win over ULV.

• Mia D’Amato (Whittier) had 9 kills hitting 0.381 in their 3-set loss to CMS.

• Everyone on CMS against Whittier. McGovern 40 assists, Beder 0.625, Holmes 14 kills and throw in Dede Carranza because she’s always awesome.

• Claire Perhach (Caltech) had 16 kills on 0.417 hitting with 2 aces in their 5-set loss to Oxy.

• Ariana Carranza (Oxy) had 14 kills, 4 aces and 21 digs in their 5-set win over Caltech.

I think CMS needs the offensive winner and it probably needs to be Jenna Holmes. She could get AVCA Player of the Week honors if they did it correctly. Of course, Georgia McGovern has been really strong this week as has Brooke McKee. The SCIAC may also want to reward PP for their week, too. Glad I don’t have to officially pick players. I can just claim that I got it right.

Alright, I think I’m done. I’m grilling chicken if anyone wants to head over. Time to focus on this baseball game. I’m so worried about our bullpen holding on to this.  Ugh. Just checked on UC Santa Cruz. They lost both today. They are 12-12 on the season and the standings have been updated.