Volleyball at Ohio University

We hate that’s he’s leaving.

We hate it because we love him. We love his wife, his kids, the coaches he brought with him or hired, the players he and his staff recruited, the entire glorious program Ryan has led so brilliantly for the last six years.

We’re happy he gets to go back to Milwaukee, which is where he played college ball and started coaching. (MatchPointOhio has a Wisconsin connection itself, as Cricket’s daughter and her husband live in Madison. We understand a little something about the pull of Wisconsin.) We’re happy he’s moving to a team which finished 13th in last year’s final RPI poll.

We wish him the utter best—but we hate that he’s going!

Looking over my clips from the MAC Championships and the NCAA tournament, a topic leapt out at me: the role of the middle hitter in locking up the opponent’s middle blocker, so our outside hitter can hit against a single blocker, not four big hands in the road. And so, the season’s final video, on middle hitter and middle blocker tactics.

It’s fun slowing down the plays to see exactly what went on. During the match, everything happens so fast that I often miss the details, the reason why the play worked or didn’t. Here it all becomes clear.

Pretty interesting, here I am writing a blog, one of the first in a long time, and I found John had written about the same event and at the same time. December is one of the busiest hustle bustle months, but what do we do? Neither of us have cable and the only way to watch NCAA semi-final vball action is to negotiate with a sports pub to put on our game of the night on one of their screens. We lucked out and so from 7:30 to 11:30 we: Okay, now switch to John’s post below….

—were hanging out, nearly alone as the night progressed, at Buffalo Wild Wings last night from 7:30 to 11:30, watching the NCAA semi-final matches in Seattle on the big screen.

Not too hard to figure out: John and Cricket from MPO.

Both matches were fascinating, but let me start with a comment I’ve made before. It’s clear, as Kerri Walsh Jennings said during an ESPN interview between points, that volleyball is the preeminent women’s sport. It is the only team sport in which more people watch women’s matches than men’s.

Consider the attendance, last spring, of the NCAA men’s final, between UC Irvine and BYU. It set a record for attendance at a neutral site, of 6,295 people. That was for a final match. Last night, in the women’s semi-finals, the attendance at Seattle’s KeyArena was 14,975.

The women play a better game! It’s more nuanced, less pure power. There is great defense, there are dramatic saves, many subtleties. Hey, the crowds have voted, and it is women’s volleyball that we follow.

So how did they do last night? Of the four teams, there were #1 seed Texas, #2 Penn State, #3 Washington, and #12 Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, as they took on Texas, had a new coach (only last year he was coaching the Dayton Flyers) and a freshman setter, Lauren Carlini. Here she is on the floor after the match:

A dramatic, fabulous victory for Wisconsin, the clear underdog now going to the finals.

Penn State was more subdued after their victory. After all, they throttled Washington 25-14, 25-13, 25-16.

It should be a great finals match on Saturday night.

We lost, you already know that. But our single match in the 2013 NCAA tournament was a good one, against a great team. They edged us. We fought the whole way and played some beautiful ball.

Just getting to Lexington on Friday for the scheduled match was a trial. The team made it, most parents made it, the band made it. Cricket and I got within twenty miles of Lexington before we heard that the University of Kentucky had closed (three and a half inches of snow, how terrifying), and the match postponed until Saturday. Cricket had an arts and crafts show to attend to in Columbus. I returned to Lexington on Saturday, and here’s the video, one of my favorites of the year.

No, wait! There was no worst! It was all fabulous, it was all the best of times. What a tournament up at the MAC Championships, culminating in this moment:

With that, we bid a fond farewell to the Spire Institute, with its walls of draped plastic, with its helpful crew (almost always), farewell to Geneva with its gray skies, its Best Friend’s Restaurant (under new management), with Ted the OU graduate and his 40-room house full of collectibles. Will we ever go back? The Spire arrangement has yielded to a much more reasonable (it seems to us) decision to host the Championships at the site of the team that wins the regular season. So as much as we’ll miss the Spire, they’ll have to make do without us next year, as we’ll be rockin’ in the Convo.

Slow in the making, here, finally, is the video of the final match. That’s all I could handle before Thanksgiving—and it may be 2014 before I present a video from the two previous matches. But I will: too much glory in the 200 clips I have not to distill them and put them up on YouTube.

The Selection Show is Sunday night at 9:30 ET. Watch and see if your team is in! 1st and 2nd rounds are Dec. 5-7: http://ow.ly/rd0L3 — with Jacque Robertson and 4 others.