09-04-2024, 03:43 PM
(09-04-2024, 09:52 AM)MSG1716 Wrote: I wouldn't worry about polls pre-season particularly with a developing younger team (half our team). What matters is improvement and development. We were better against Wisconsin than Minnesota. What will matter for end of year seeding is RPI (which will be great) and beating Pitt & Louisville to win the conference. The winner of the ACC should be a #1 seed.
DS. I was a little surprised too to see Cawa over Pringle as the second DS after Beaven. Guess Pringle is being recruited over. I trust Hambly to pick his best players. I wouldn't be shocked it Yu ends up the serving specialist over Pringle as the year goes on. She has done well in her limited action. I know Hambly follows closely the percentage of service points won by each player. It's not aces. For instance, Kipp led the team in aces but wasn't top 5 as "best server". It's all about points won. Great serving is getting the opponent out of system making it a 50-50 or better that we win the point. Stanford was great at that as a team last weekend. Hambly, as we all know, does not care about service errors. To him, it's a little like strike outs in baseball today. An out is an out and what matters is your on base percentage.
What I've noticed most about the first few weeks of the season is that teams with hard to return serves are the teams winning. That and blocks. SMU won at the service line. We won at the service line. I will keep quoting WI Coach Kelly Sheffield that Stanford serving is "narly". Hope it stays that way. We need to improve our blocking which I'm confident will happen with more playing time together. I think Andrew will be a top defensive player and our new OHs will get better and better with more action.
Some very good thoughts, many of which mirror my own. I think the three areas to see improvement in are:
1) Blocking: 4 blocks in 5 sets against Minnesota and 2 blocks in 4 sets against Wisconsin. Yikes. Minnesota hit .302; Wisconsin hit .341. Double yikes. You want your block to bother the hitter enough that even when you don't get a block, you force them into a mistake or funnel into a waiting defender and we saw very little of that. Way too often, the hitter was going up against a poorly formed block or a late blocker and cut inside very effectively. I hope that Andrew comes along as a defensive player, but she only had one solo block and one assist the entire week end. To be fair, being able to read the set and time the block is a learned skill, and there is going to be an adjustment switching from high school to college athletes (especially elite setters and hitters). I expect she will get better, but the question is whether she will get to be a "top defensive player" or if she tops out at "adequate" (or worse). Lots of room for improvement, and I expect a lot of it will come, hopefully by the end of the year.
2) Hitting from pin hitters not named Elia Rubin. Kurt had a great game against Wisconsin, but was a disaster again Minnesota; Harvey had a rough week end full stop. If my math is right, for the week end, Kurt hit .207 and Harvey hit .103; combined they hit .155 (40 kills and 22 errors in 116 swings). Rubin by herself had 39 kills over the week end and only 13 errors. If we don't get better performance from our OH2 and OPP, Rubin's arm is going to fall off (89 swings over both matches), and like Kipp last season, she's going to tire and be less effective (and opponents will shade her).
3) Our defensive specialists have one job and struggled at it. Beavin had 2 receiving errors against Minnesota, which is as many as any other player, and only 7 total digs across both matches. Cawa did better; I didn't notice her (which for a defensive specialist is a compliment), while as others have noticed, Anna Pringle seems to have been over-recruited. Yu served well this week end, after struggling against Milwaukee.
But that is far outweighed by the good:
1) I was really happy to see the team's resilience. Against Minnesota we came back from 24-19 to take a 25-24 lead. It was a shame that we couldn't take the set, but then against Wisconsin we came back from 24-21 to win the set 26-24, and I think coming against 5 set points against Minnesota gave the team belief in themselves. Also, we came back from down 2 sets to 1 against Minnesota, having lost the third set decisively at 25-16. We could have folded (the way Wisconsin did against Texas), but we won set 4 decisively, and then closed it out in set 5.
2) The back row defense is generally very good. There were several plays where our opponent got a clean hit, and we managed to dig it well and either go into our offense or at least extend the rally. There is a psychological component to this (even if you don't wind up winning the rally), because after a while you start getting into the hitters' heads and they start to think "what do I need to do to get this down", and they force the issue. There's still a bit to clean up; there were too many overpasses (and see my comment about the DS's above). But overall, they played well.
3) The middles were very good offensively. If Francis can stay healthy, I think we will get more offense from our middles than last year. Between them, they hit .400 for the weekend (36 kills and only 8 errors on 70 swings). Francis was phenomenal and Andrew doesn't look like a freshman (only 4 hitting errors all week end). I thought Francis on the slide, in particular, was deadly; neither team really had an answer for it, and I thought we were deploying it more frequently than we did last year.
4) Miner is setting up the offense faster. I'm surprised given that we have so many new hitters; I expected that if anything we'd see more looping "4" sets than before, but maybe now that we can't rely on Kipp to out jump and simply overpower the block, I think we are seeing more slides (as noted above) and shoots. I'd still like to see more quicksets to our mids, and I did see a couple miscommunications, as you would expect early in the season. But still, I wanted to see this last year.
5) Serving was, for the most part, great. Against Minnesota we had as many aces (12) as service errors, and against Wisconsin we had 10 aces. Importantly, we had several runs keyed by great serves (including the two end-of-first-set runs), which not only is a way to rack up points in a hurry, it can also put the defense on tilt. Harvey had a crappy game up front, but was a star from the serving line (7 aces against Minnesota and 4 against Wisconsin), and Yu did a lot better than against Marquette (3 aces versus only 2 errors). Rubin also had a few nice service runs. There were still a few times where we had a run of service errors, where I thought we were making it easy for them (including three in a row with Harvey, Rubin, and Yu in the fourth set against Wisconsin when we were trying to put it away) , but that is nitpicking.
6) Rubin was Rubin. She has stepped up as OH1 with Kipp's departure and is probably a more complete player than Kipp. She had 39 kills for the week end, hitting .292 despite being the focus of defensive attention. But she also had 28 digs across both days, and as I noted above, had some nice service runs (5 aces versus 5 service errors across both games).
7) Kurt had a coming out party against Wisconsin (16 kills, 5 errors, on 34 swings to hit .324). Yes, she had a rough game against Minnesota, but that was her first collegiate game against top flight competition, so hopefully we give her a mulligan on that one, and hope this portends good things. If I am remembering right (it might have been Rubin, though), she also unloaded on a couple serves that completely befuddled Wisconsin. Once Blyashov comes back, it will be very interesting to see how we accommodate the three.
No rest for the weary. We have Marquette today, and Santa Barbara and Pepperdine... and then have to gear up for (current but soon to be former #1) Texas next Sunday, at (soon to be former #2) Nebraska in two weeks and #9 Kentucky after that. The luster of Texas and Nebraska is probably down a smidge because of their losses, but these will be very very tough games. Taking two out of the three ranked teams would be a minor miracle.
BC
