Volleyball at Ohio University

Glory to you and all that you stand for.

Congratulations in your journeys.

Rats that you have to leave us.

Mauckzilla: Your attitude, your spirit, your way. What a guide, what a beacon of lift you have been.

Whitney: You are our hometown girl and are a great source of pride—and damn, you sure started hitting hard your senior year.

Jill: With Jill it can get done. You reached down and saved the whole team when your coach left the team empty-handed. You are positive. Big positive. Great hands, great contribution everywhere. You even love blocking. You cannot be replaced.

Molly: You are un-flappable. Not only have you dared the other teams to come at you, you have gone after the other teams. Miami and Western Michigan were great in the MAC Championship, but you wanted that trophy more than anybody out there. And the whole team caught your fire. We will miss that fire.

Amanda: You brought life in your eyes to the Bobcats. You not only taught everyone how to finish off a team, but how to annihilate them in premier sport fashion. You are a winner! Keep winning.

Ellen Herman heads to Anaheim, CA this week to train with the U.S. Women’s National Team. After some years in Colorado Springs, the team has settled on Anaheim as their training center, and an upcoming focus is the nine-day Pan American Cup, to be held in Miami from June 24–July 4.

This tournament, which will see high-powered teams from Brazil, Cuba, Peru, Canada and Puerto Rico, among other countries, serves as a qualifying event for the 2010 FIVA World Grand Prix. (The U.S. team qualified for this year’s Grand Prix last year, at the 2008 Women’s Pan-American Cup in Mexicali and Tijuana, Mexico. It gets a little complex.)

Ellen is not on the preliminary roster of 19 players scheduled to play in Miami, but she’ll clearly be training with the best women in the country. Also, with two outstanding coaches: New Zealand’s Hugh McCutcheon, who took the U.S. men’s team to the gold medal at last year’s Olympics, and Karch Kiraly, who was recently named one of the team’s assistant coaches. Kiraly is the only player to have won Olympic gold medals in both indoor and beach volleyball.

In volleyball, Ellen can do it all. Pound the ball, hit from the back row, roll it over the blockers for a killer drop to the floor, dig everything that comes at her in the back row, and, as in the photo, receive serves with an amazingly dependable overhand pass.

OU fans are glowing, once again.

We scrimmaged four teams, two games apiece, at the team’s final spring tournament, yesterday at the University of Cincinnati. I went to the same little underground box of a gym last year, but I’d forgotten how hard it was to take photos there: other than the two ref’s stands, there wasn’t a place to stand even three feet above the floor. Hard, in fact, to get far enough away from the action when shooting with an 85mm lens. Thrilling, though, to disappear for five hours into an intense cube filled with volleyball.

Ryan was off on volleyball business, so Meghan and Kyle took care of the coaching.

The coaches

Jane and Mandy sat out the day, which left us with only eight players. Katie, Ellen, Meghan and Sue hit some hard balls, but there was a surprise in the wings.
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Katie Post

Ellen Herman

Meghan Simons

Sue Jacobi

And now the kicker. Do you recognize who stepped in as middle blocker, and middle hitter?
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It’s Nicole Staverman, and her stats were impressive. She put her first two spikes down and rode a game or two at a perfect thousand. Missed one, had two more kills and finished the day, if I counted correctly, at four-for-five, or a .800 hitting percentage.

Of course she spikes, she was a hitter all through high school and Club ball. Sarah Petrulis did the same, and for all I know Meryl Bender hit for years as well, I’ll have to ask her.

A serve can look a lot like a spike, and here’s Meryl from the line:
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Michelle Jantsch did all the setting, and we sometimes ran her around a little:
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And the backcourt was busy. Sarah playing the libero position, Meryl and Nicole diving:
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At the net, it doesn’t look promising, as Meghan and Michelle go up to block one of Cleveland State’s best hitters:
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But here’s the happy result: ball down on their side:
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Okay, one more since I’m having so much fun. The rest of the photos I’ll put up at the 2009 Season page in another day or two, when I get access to some broadband. (Also, there will be a few new fan photos in Fanfare, see the sidebar to the right.) Here’s Sue Jacobi blasting one through Youngstown State:
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The bottom line? We split with Cleveland State, took two from Youngstown State, lost two to Maryland (two that we shouldn’t have given up), and took a satisfying final two games from Cincinnati at the end.

That’s it for spring play. But the end of August and our first tournament is not that far away. Cheers for that.

What a great early effort against Louisville Saturday in the Convo. As always, the pictures show it best. Click here to see them. Mandy Nichols is in the warm-up in pic 3.–
Cricket

The new season has started and all of the players are reminded that they are not bad,
but they are not as great as they are going to be. I have taken some pictures of
Spring Practice just to show you what the players have to go through.
First, they bow to the higher powers of Volleyball.……Follow in the 2009 Season section of MatchPointOhio the trials and tribulations of our Bobcats in pictures.

Ambitious, isn’t she?

Ellen didn’t drop too many balls at the tournament in Indianapolis: 46 kills, .319 hitting percentage.  On paper, at least, (wish I’d been there to report on the subtle details) it turned out a pretty good day.  You can read the stats on the official OU site, here.

We beat Ferris State, the University of Indianapolis, Illinois State and IUPUI.

Next Saturday in the Convo: Louisville.

Early coaching

Spring practice began last Monday. MatchPointOhio went over today to take some photos, and found, with only nine players in attendance, that Meghan Keck was setting and Ryan was hitting. Meghan was on the mark, and smart hitter that Ryan—or else our blocking needs a little work, because he kept putting the ball down past double and even triple blocks. With the seniors finished and the recruits not due until the summer practices, the team is a bit thin. Also, Mandy Nichols is out for a couple of months with a foot injury–though she was there and hoofing around pretty well in a boot.

Meghan Keck setting

The team will go into their first tournament with only five days of practice. (Most of our opponents, going to school on the semester system, will have been practicing for several weeks.) We might be a little rough around the edges, but the athletic ability of this team is evident from the top. They’ll be practicing most mornings from 7:30 to 10, after which, three times a week, they lift for an hour.

The coach hits one

How incredibly lucky we are to have a competitive Division I team in Athens. The greatest sport in the world, being played by a dynamic team, right here in the Convo.

Work shared by all

Here’s my excuse, the one that cannot be resisted: my grandson. He’s getting to be a regular presence on these pages: I drove out to see him in Colorado last December, and I’m flying out tomorrow for a spring visit—so I’ll miss the team’s first tournament of the season, in Indianapolis this Saturday. We’ll play several teams, including Wheeling Jesuit (we played them last spring in the Convo), Ferris state, Illinois State and an Indiana University team.

Cricket Jones can’t make that tournament either, but will be in attendance at the Convo to take photos the following weekend for a scrimmage with Louisville. They’re a great team to watch: we lost to them two years ago in a heartbreaker in Louisville, and beat them in a joyous match last November in the Convo. We play them a second time this spring, in Louisville, on April 18th.

Ellen Herman hits against Bowling Green

In February, along with 160 other collegiate players, Ellen Herman attended the U.S. Women’s National Team Open Tryouts in Colorado Springs. Last year, as avid fans will remember, she was one of 24 players selected for the National A2 team—and this year she’s done it again. In late May she’ll attend a training session in Minneapolis, after which the A2 players will split into two 12-player rosters, and the two teams will compete in the Open Division of the National Championships.

Last year, you will also remember, she was selected as the MVP of the entire Open Division Championships. From that peak, only the National Team looms higher.

Is anyone headed to those Championships in Minneapolis? MatchPointOhio can’t make it, but we’d love to post some photos.

Here’s some great news for both me and the team: the MAC, feeling the economic pressure from the national crisis, has announced a simplification in referee operations for the 2009 season, and starting in September I’ll be the one refereeing all the games in the Convo. I guess they finally had a good look at my resume, my extensive history on the stand at the Trotsky tournament (see photo), my lightning-fast reflexes, my 20-20 eyesight, and my complete impartiality (well, we’ll see about that). Also, I’d told them that I was willing to do the job for free. So we won’t be having any more problems with those pesky double-hit or lift calls on our players, and I’ll be passing out yellow and red cards to the visiting teams—and their coaches—faster than you can say, Ohio State sure had a lousy season last year.