NCAA volleyball: AVCA All-Americans; “heavyweight foursome;” Sioux Falls connection

TAMPA, Florida — The Wednesday before the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship is always busy.

Not only do all four teams — top-seeded Nebraska, No. 3 Wisconsin, No. 4 Pittsburgh and No. 7 Texas — practice and have media obligations, the AVCA announces its All-America teams.

Details follow, but the VolleyballMag.com All-American teams, coach, player and freshman of the year will be announced next week because we include Thursday’s national semifinals and Sunday championship match.

In this notebook, we’ve got all of the above plus some more intriguing TV news, why they won’t spread out the matches in the first three rounds, a tidbit about South Dakota that is so good, and plenty more.

And what Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield said:

“This is a heavyweight foursome here. These are elite teams, elite programs, players that are a variety of ages, but the young people don’t play young and they don’t play scared and they’re not going to be scared on this stage.

“And that’s one of the cool things, even the young players have played on big stages in front of big television crowds, in front of big arenas or football fields — international. It’s a lot of people that are going to be flexing out there. This is going to be a really fun tournament.”

AVCA All-Americans

This is a four-team tournament with plenty of stars, that’s for sure.

Pittsburgh’s Olivia Babcock was named the AVCA national freshman of the year Wednesday as the organization announced its three All-American teams and honorable mentions. 

The first team was, as you would expect, chock full of players competing in the national semifinals, including Babcock’s teammate, Rachel Fairbanks.

Nebraska players were Merritt Beason and Lexi Rodriguez. Wisconsin has Sarah Franklin and Texas has Madisen Skinner and Asjia O’Neal.

Click here to see the complete list of AVCA All-Americans.

The AVCA coach of the year is announced Thursday and the player of the year is announced Friday at the All-American luncheon.

O’Gorman HS of Sioux Falls looms large

O’Gorman High School in Sioux Falls (population 196,528) is sporting some pretty impressive volleyball credentials this week.

This past Saturday, USA Volleyball stars Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss won the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Finals in Doha, Qatar, and the $150,000 prize that came with it. The two young Americans are locks for the Paris Olympics and the 6-foot-4 Kloth is a product of O’Gorman. She went from there to Creighton, had an All-American career, transferred to play beach (for the first time) at LSU, she and Nuss became partners and best friends, and the rest, as they say is history.

Well, Nebraska setter Bergen Reilly, an AVCA second-teamer, has had a tremendous freshman season for a kid who left that same O’Gorman last January to enroll in college. And she happens to be one of Kloth’s biggest fans. For that matter, so is her sister, Raegen Reilly, a setter who just finished her junior year at South Dakota State. The older Reilly is in the transfer portal.

Anyway, we showed the photo above that Kloth shared with us and Bergen Reilly lit up.

“She was my role model growing up and there wasn’t a lot of players like us growing up in South Dakota,” she said. “South Dakota is growing in volleyball and getting there, but she was the one person I looked up to. She’s helped me a lot and we’ve stayed in touch and it’s so cool to see her doing so well on the international beach.”

Reilly figured she was in the third grade when that picture was taken.

“I was probably just getting into volleyball. It was probably one of my first camps.”

Bergen and Raegen would go watch O’Gorman when Kloth played. 

“I loved watching her and she would always come up and say hi to us after. She was a great role model and I always left smiling.”

Omaha perspective on Nebraska

August 30 seems like a volleyball lifetime ago, but that was the day that Omaha got swept by the Huskers in front of a crowd of 92,300 in Nebraska’s football stadium. Omaha had its own travails, falling to 0-3 at the time en route to a nine-match losing streak to open the season. 

But the Mavericks rebounded and not only won The Summit League Championship, got to play in NCAA Tournament, getting swept by Kansas in the first round.

Omaha coach Matt Buttermore was at Nebraska’s practice Wednesday.

“I thought we would watching them here,” Buittermore said. “They were pretty good. A lot of things can happen over a season and they did a good job of finishing strong.”

The stadium match was one that was referred to all season, but Buttermore wasn’t sure of its short-term impact.

“I don’t think we’ll know that for a little while yet,” the fifth-year coach said. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime event and we had a lot of crazy things go on and a lot of ups and downs. I think it’s one  that we’ll look back on. We’ll know more in 10 years than we do this year.”

Overlapping matches

Don’t expect that the NCAA will keep you from watching four or five matches at a time the first three rounds any time soon.

“We work really hard with our institutions to make sure we’re providing opportunities to play on campus,” said Kristen Fasbender, the NCAA director of championships. “So when they bid, we tell them time frames we would like them to have those matches in. Playing matches at 11 o’clock during first and second rounds is a little bit harder. They have the ability to say what works and that’s why we usually stay in the evening because we can have full buildings and give more opportunities.”

But what about spreading them out so we have fewer matches going on at once and you can see more teams?

“You’ve ESPN+, which was awesome this year, and you’ve got the 5th Set (whiparound show on ESPN+), which give you access to everything. 

“It’s funny, because we get people like you, which is great, and we get to regional weekend and everyone’s mad because we’re playing at 11 in the morning. So it’s a balance of what we can and can’t do. 

“But we’re always looking at ways we can expand it and try and find the best coverage for the sport. And we’ll see what keeps moving with the trajectory we are on right now.”

Youth is served at Texas

No doubt the improvement of freshman setter Ella Swindle coincides with Texas being here. But it was quite a process. The Longhorns struggled offensively at times early on, but of late have been lighting it up offensively. The last 12 matches Texas has hit .330 or higher six times and have never dipped below .241, which was not the case early on. Four times in the first 12 matches the Longhorns hit below .200.

Texas coach Jerritt Elliott talked about it Wednesday when he was at the news-conference podium with Skinner and O’Neal.

“The maturity, you see the people sitting up here, the quality people they are, when you have a young setter there’s a lot of frustrations early on. You could never see it from the way they wore it on the sleeve, the way they talked to Ella. They were always in her corner supporting her and just telling her that it was going to get to this point,” Elliott said.

“They could have ruined her confidence early on, but because of the women they are, they just were such good teammates and added to her confidence and gave her a lot of good things to think about.”