Continued from the Regular Season recap.
WAC
Tournament
11-23-18 vs UMKC Roos
I’m embarrassed to recap this tournament, since I didn’t
see or hear any of it. Frankly, I’m not
paying ESPN two-cents for anything, much less their streaming service. I admit that this does hit me where I live
though.
For their first match in the semi-finals, the Aggies beat UMKC 3-1. UMKC had six aces
in first set, but the Aggies got it together after that. Megan
Hart, Savannah Davison, and Ashley Anselmo had double-digit
kills. Tatyana Battle made two incredible saves on one point and made the NCAA Volleyball Twitter feed
highlights. They’d face Utah Valley in the championship, who
blew away top seed UTRGV 3-0. I thought
that Utah Valley was a good team, but I wonder what happened to the
Vaqueros. Adam Young was doing the call for the WAC and ESPN 3. It looked like a good crowd there in
Bakersfield even with the home team eliminated.
11-24-18 vs Utah Valley Wolverines
A day after the Saturday night match on Sunday evening,
it finally occurred to me that the local TV news would likely be covering the Aggies in a championship game. If I’d thought of that Saturday night (and
could tear myself away from a good episode of Babylon 5), I think the match would have been over by the time the
sports news came on, and I could have gotten the story on three different
stations. On Sunday, I was lucky that
one of stations repeated the results. I
was not so lucky that it was a low reception station.
I flipped over right as the Sports was starting on KVIA.
A wave of nervous anticipation suddenly swept over me. After the first story, they were doing the
volleyball story. I was holding my
breath. I didn’t have any sound, but
could make out the digitally scrambled images.
There in the titles I could see, “Aggies win,” and an image of the girls
in sunglasses posing with the trophy. I
exhaled. That moment was way too
nerve-wracking, especially with the bad reception. I watched again during the late night news
and they showed the girls at their NCAA bracket watch party. At that point, I was definitely sure they’d
won. I wish I could have heard the interviews
with Coach Jordan and Tatyana Battle.
I got the paper from my parents the next day with a
recap. It was really detailed about the
championship match with the Utah Valley
Wolverines. They probably figured
nobody saw it because it was on ESPN pay-Internet. The Aggies dropped the first set, won the
second in extra points, and then won next two to take the match 3-1.
Halle
Razzo and Briana
Ainsworth were mentioned for going on long serving runs. Tatyana
Battle, Savannah Davision, and Megan Hart all came up with big
kills. Brigette Lowe hit the championship-winning shot. Taty and Sav made the all-tournament
team. Megan Hart was the tournament MVP
(and she’s beautiful, of course). She
had 13 kills and 10 blocks in the championship game.
I don’t know I would have gone to the watch party if I’d
known about it ahead of time. I would
have been nervous about going. I’m not a
booster; I just go to the games. But
this time, I don’t know if I could have resisted giving everyone
congratulations in person. If a
situation like this comes up again, I’ll think seriously about going.
NCAA
Tournament
11-29-18 vs Oregon Ducks
I was on pins and needles for about a half-hour as KRUX radio was still broadcasting music
past the announced start time of the coverage.
Thankfully, a DJ came on and said that the match was delayed, as Baylor and Hawaii’s match were running long and going into a fifth set. (Baylor won.)
In the pregame, Adam
Young interviewed AD Mario Moccia. Mario sat next to Randy Johnson at the airport there.
Johnson’s daughter, Willow,
plays for Oregon. She’s also a lefty like
her old man. An ex-NFL player’s daughter
plays on the Ducks too. Adam and Mario
were both seriously jealous of Oregon’s new arena there ($250M-worth of
jealous). With the tournament seeding, Oregon
was ranked #15 in nation.
Mario offhandedly mentioned that Tatyana Battle was playing with a broken foot. I keep hearing this every so often, but I’ve
seen no evidence of it. She’s been
awesome basically all season. Taty’s
often smiling, so she doesn’t seem to be in terrible pain. I don’t know how she’s playing so well and
being so graceful with a broken foot.
I was hearing the Aggie fight song in the background. Was the Aggie
band there? In spite of the excellent
facilities, Adam was broadcasting the game seated behind backline, three levels
up. He estimated a great crowd there between
three and four thousand.
Though at work, I was able to listen to whole
match. I had stuff to do away from my
desk, but still had plenty to do there, as I’m still trying to catch up from
taking some days off this month. I
e-mailed Ron at the start of the match.
He followed along using statcast.
I never got it to come up for me. One last note, Adam mentioned that a couple
other WAC Volleyball teams were playing in lower level tournaments, including
Cal Baptist. UTRGV
rejected an automatic bid to a tournament for winning the regular season. I’m sure their players were pleased by that. (I guess the Aggies did that last year as
they won the regular season and didn’t go anywhere either.)
Set 1
The link to the PAC-12
video feed started working right as the match started. Unfortunately, it was a pay-service, so all I
got was a four-minute preview. Nice
camera work. The court was indeed
beautiful with a golden silhouette of a forest superimposed on it. Brigette
Lowe was starting and she looked uncharacteristically very serious. Julianna
Salanoa hammered a kill on the first swing of the match. She’s from the Northwest area. She had family and friends there in the crowd. That’s about all of the video I got to see.
The Aggies took an early lead. At 9-4 Aggies, Oregon took a timeout. The Ducks went on a run to get it within
one. The Aggies looked good on several
points. Savannah Davison got a solo block, Jules made an overpass kill, and
Natalie Mikels got a dump kill, but
Ducks came back to take the lead 13-15. Timeout
Aggies. Kiley Tonge and Krysten
Garrison came in late. Garrison was
actually working as the setter. By 22-24,
the Aggies had fought off four set points. Oregon took a timeout. Sav had an out serve coming out of the
timeout and the Ducks took it 22-25. Julianna had five kills in the set.
Set 2: Ducks 1, Aggies 0
This set stayed close.
Jules kept racking up the kills. Oregon
went up by three, but the Aggies would tie it at 13. The Aggies took the lead, 15-14, before the media
timeout. Tatyana Battle served up an
ace to put the Aggies up 3. She served another
to increase it to four. Timeout Oregon. Out of that, Taty put in another ace, 18-14. Megan
Hart got a kill to make it 20-15. Ashley Anselmo got a kill after several
rejections earlier. Jules brought it to
set point with kill #11, 24-16. The Aggies
closed it out, 25-18.
Set 3: Aggies 1, Ducks 1
Oregon went up four early. Nat got another dump kill at 9-11 Ducks. During the match, the Oregon setter actually
made a few attacks. It was something
about the system they use that allowed it. I hadn’t seen anyone use that before. It was 11-15 Ducks at the media timeout. 13-18 an Oregon ace prompted an Aggie
timeout. The Aggies did start mounting a
comeback. Sav got an ace at 15-20. Tatyana began asserting herself and started getting
kills late, but the Ducks took it 21-25.
Set 4: Ducks 2, Aggies 1
Garrison started the set. Nat began it with an ace, 1-0 Aggies. The Aggies went up three, but the Ducks went
on a four-point run with Willow Johnson
on serve to make it 6-8. Timeout Aggies.
Cat Kelly was brought in for
the first time. I’m glad she was able
play today. Willow and Oregon continued
on. 6-13 Oregon, timeout Aggies
again. Willow finished her run with an ace
before the Aggies finally sided out. That
was an 11-point run. The Oregon crowd
gave her a standing ovation.
Briana
Ainsworth dove into the media table trying for a save at 7-18. The senior was going all out. The coach probably could have used another
timeout. I’ve seen coaches use their
challenges as timeouts (11-18-18). Either the opportunity never presented itself, or the coach didn’t think
of it, or (more likely) things were too far gone to bother. 9-23 Jordan
Pleasants came in to serve. 10-23 Analyssa Acosta came in. The circumstances weren’t good, but I was
very happy for her to finally get into another game. 11-24 Jules got her final kill. 11-25
and 3-1 Oregon was the final.
There wasn’t an interview with Coach Jordan afterward. Adam
said he didn’t want the coach to bother to visiting him “in the
nosebleeds.” Julianna Salanoa was the Aggie standout with 15 kills. Next year, we’re bringing her family and
friends in for every game. Tatyana Battle came on late with 14
kills. Savannah Davison had 11 and Megan
Hart had 7. I think one of the Ducks
had 18 kills to lead everyone, but without statcast, it was too much trouble to
track down her name.
Summary
Sum up the whole season?
This is kind of intimidating.
We’ll start with the coach, Mike Jordan. First, he’s
done a great job of recruiting and training players. Second, after losing five seniors last season
and a couple of early injuries this season, the coach always seemed to be
scrambling to put out a lineup. Last
season was certainly good training for that, as multiple injuries had hobbled
the team. Having the conference player
of the year (KC Tohm) and the libero
of year (Ari Sierra) helped to lead
those Aggies to a regular season championship.
This time though, he didn’t have those stars, but what
Coach Jordan did have this time was quality depth in the front line. With ten five-set matches, they needed
that. This advantage became a hydra for
other teams: stop one girl, two more
sprang up to replace her. This really
showed itself early in the win against Arizona (9-8-18). Coach Jordan became Coach Maddon from his beloved Cubs and went mad scientist with his
lineup, confusing the heck out of the Wildcats.
That sort of became the pattern for the season, though it became much
more orderly later on. The coach would
change out players to ride whoever was working best in that day’s match. All the girls have different styles, but
there was little drop off in the quality of play. By the end of the season, they’d had enough
experience to all be excellent options.
For the players individually, we’ll start with the
seniors. Captain Tatyana Battle had star talent and showed it at times, but she was
injured for most of the season (though she never showed it). So, Taty only led the team in kills and digs,
but at full strength she might have been like Ragni Knudsen from UTRGV,
conference MVP. Taty was always the main
option for big points, but this Aggie team actually didn’t need their whole
offense going through one player. They
had plenty of great options, but Taty was capable of taking over. (Go back and look at the regular season recap. She’s mentioned several times.)
Setter Briana
Ainsworth split time with Natalie
Mickels to great effect. The both of
them did well in assists and serving.
Bri had some memorable serving runs.
Then there’s Bri’s wonderful smile.
You can’t put a game stat on it, but it’s real for the fans and her
teammates. Both her and Taty, obviously
very serious about volleyball, seemed to have a light-hearted attitude. I have no idea how their practices went, but
I’d think these two set the tone for this team.
Next year, this team should again have an embarrassing
number of great players. They all had
their shining moments. The Aggies have seven
girls (in my opinion) capable of getting double-digit kills and making blocks
in any match. They’ll lose Tatyana, but
will hopefully get Lia Mosher and Brielle Sterns back. They also had several servers capable of
getting aces on a regular basis.
The one shaky area of the team was libero. Ari
Sierra spoiled us for two seasons.
In spite of having several defensive players on the team, nobody was
being groomed for the position during that time. The coach tried several options before Halle Razo won the job, but it did take
some growing. Next season, Halle should
start off as a good libero and improve from there. (She was also good on serve.) I get the impression that Kiley Tonge will be seeing more time
next season from what I saw by the end of this season.
As I mentioned before, Natalie Mikels was great this season as setter. Her serve was just lethal at times. Freshman Krysten
Garrison was used as a hitter and a setter in spots this year. Given how many hitters and blockers this team
has, she might be the other setter next year.
Let’s talk hitters and blockers. Savannah
Davison was a revelation this season.
I’d seen her in the Scrimmage
last year (8-19-17) and she looked good, but was injured for the rest of
the season. She was ready this
year. From the get-go, Sav was out
playing nearly every point. The coach
had a lot of confidence in her. She
looked really good, but would have those “freshman moments” from this being her
first season playing. It’s worth noting
that two seasons ago, Tatyana was considered a “defensive liability.” Look how she turned out.
Sav’s low point was that UTRGV match here (10-27-18). She might have been
about to lose her starting spot to Cat Kelly, who looked ready to play more,
but Cat fell very ill before the next match.
To Savannah’s credit, she came back a better, more focused player. I wonder if she’ll be the captain next
year. I also wonder about her
serving. She generally got better as the
season went along, but was replaced pretty regularly. She also used three different styles to
serve. It’s an area to work on if she’s
going to be captain.
As far as other blockers and hitters go, oh my goodness,
this team is loaded. I hope Cat Kelly will be okay next season,
because Sav and Cat (sounds like a TV show) together on court on a regular
basis would be a tremendous combination.
Cat could really kill it. I only
saw her serve once and she looked okay.
She’ll need to work on that if she’s playing more. Julianna
Salanoa is turning into the star she looks like with that powerful build. Not to mention, Jules has a great winning
smile. Opposing teams couldn’t ignore Ashley Anselmo, as she was a steady
supporting force. Brigette Lowe really shined at the WAC Tournament. It was the
culmination of her getting more regular playing time.
The team lost two middle blockers, Lia Mosher and Brielle
Sterns, at the beginning of the season.
Both of them looked good last year, so hopefully they’ll pick up where
they left off next year. Freshman Lindsay Blakey seemed really tentative
attacking, but when she was in and took a full swing, she looked good. You can’t teach height and Lindsay’s got
that.
What this left in the middle was Megan Hart. Basically,
combining her with any of the hitters was a good combination. Her kills so often seemed big and
demoralizing for the other team. It was
just majestic watching her slap them down, like she was bitch-slapping the other
team along with the ball. She was really
good on serve too, though she was getting taken out for it quite a bit later in
the season. The coach perhaps wanted to
keep her out of the back row? (I don’t
know how volleyball rotation, positioning, and substitutions work.) I’d keep her away from positions where she
might be diving for balls on the floor too (to protect that bad knee). And (everyone together now for one last time
this season), she’s beautiful.
The strength of the team in depth is also a bit of
problem. Finding playing time for all
these talented players was a juggling act this season. The good news is that they were kept fresh
and got game experience, but they probably weren’t being brought to their peak potential. Some of these girls could be stars on other
WAC teams. If someone asserts themselves
as a star next year on this team, the lineup may not have as many substitutions
during games.
No comments:
Post a Comment