2026 Women’s Indoor Volleyball Thread

[LonghornFan4Ever]

[LonghornFan4Ever]

Time to make up for yesterday…

[TexTheHorn24]

22 minutes ago, LonghornFan4Ever said:

Time to make up for yesterday…

Need a win

[TexTheHorn24]

Terrible meltdown. Had the game basically in control and mistake basically gave it away. Might be time to start pushing Elliot towards retirement. 

[HonkEm]

13 minutes ago, TexTheHorn24 said:

Terrible meltdown. Had the game basically in control and mistake basically gave it away. Might be time to start pushing Elliot towards retirement. 

Didn't watch, but bet that sucked. What did Elliott do wrong?

Edited 10 hours ago by HonkEm

[LonghornFan4Ever]

Fortunately, soccer has picked up the slack.  This is going to be a tightly contested Directors’ Cup race if the fall sports are an indication of how this college athletics season is going to go for Texas…

[ChanmanV]

1 hour ago, TexTheHorn24 said:

Terrible meltdown. Had the game basically in control and mistake basically gave it away. Might be time to start pushing Elliot towards retirement. 

Even though we lost, it was the best we've looked in a several games. The young players are getting more experience and starting to improve some. Florida is a tough team and if a couple points go different we would have beaten them. Biggest thing is Andersen needs to work on her passing. Teams are targeting her on serves, but Gugina and Andersen are starting to get more comfortable hitting. Spears is still just a cannon. She's still needs to improve her ability to hit off hands and hit a cut. She pretty much just hits straight and hard which doesn't work against the good blocking teams. 

[SL Xpress]

This team has a huge deficit in serving and setting against any really good team they face.

Florida has issues with their pin hitters. King/Chaney/Leban/Byrd are not horrible, but they're not as good or as terminal as the pins on other higher seed teams, which is part of the reason why the outcome was so contested. All of them other than Byrd are short, and Byrd, for as athletic as she is in terms of her vertical, is not very nimble. She's slow to her spots and terrible on serve receive/defense.

Texas is actually decent in serve receive, but they have issues against great servers - but a lot of teams have problems with great servers. Taylor Parks was giving us fits last night. At times, we could not get her off the service line. Bella Lee, and King were also effective. Same thing happened against OU. Same thing happened against Alabama. Same thing happened regularly in nonconference when we'd get dominated by top teams. Yes, maybe get better at serve receive, but what would also be helpful is if we could return fire, but we can't, because our serving sucks for the most part. Which was the story for last season and why I never thought we had a chance to make it to the Final Four - and is the biggest reason we lost to Wisconsin. Only this season, the serving is several magnitudes less effective. 

It was interesting to see Elliott so animated on the sideline. I'm curious if he's heard from donors that the Tom Landry look on the bench isn't cutting it as the season goes down in flames. 

This is the second season of 4 where he decided he needed an upgrade from Swindle and he ended up sacrificing the season as a result. It's 2024 all over again. For much of the same reasons. This offseason is going to be so interesting for me. 

[mymy32]

I echo what six said about the serving. I'll also add that, being there in person, yes, the sets weren't great (especially Rella's at times), but the biggest differences seemed to be 1) an almost non-existent block, 2) the inability to terminate on the attacks, and 3) not having the defense set up right behind the non-existent block. All these seem to be intertwined. 

At the beginning of the match, it looked like our block was giving them line. And to their credit, FL was hitting it. But our back row defenders were set up too far into the court to even attempt a dig. I get trying to make them hit it out, but after they scored a few times, adjust! 

And I can't tell you how many times our hitters seemed to hit right at their back row players. Never seemed to swing for the open floor. And then their hitters always found the big swaths of court with no defender near, and we got to see our gals do the elegant yet useless swan dive to dig a ball that was already bouncing into the crowd.

Is that a scouting issue? I don't know. But I can't remember a Texas team with so many highly ranked pins that just can't regularly find the floor. 

 

Edited 19 minutes ago by mymy32