slot canyon

Have to laugh at myself.....sorry 'bout that. Saw an article and had a twitch in my trigger finger.

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2886279-4-star-pf-prospect-jt-thor-commits-to-auburn-over-oklahoma-state

Another article about Jessie Blaine : https://extrainningsoftball.com/extra-star-power-sec-bound-catcher-jessie-blaine-11-military-moves-later-shes-made-an-impression-coast-to0coast/

Thanks for that. I have no idea who they have as candidates but along the lines you were suggesting AUGoo I looked at the Baylor staff. They made the semi-finals this year. One assistant Samantha Erger has been there 5 years as assistant coach/recruiting coordinator. Prior HC at a small college in Texas. Played her college VB at Bowling Green. She represents what may be available. She has a family and her spouses work may prelude someone like that from looking for another position. I am not implying that she is even a candidate but she has the type of profile that could be an example of possibilities. Also noticed their HC Ryan McGuyre who has been there since 2015 is only 44 years old. He has steadily improved the program from overall 17-13 his first year to this years 29-2. His previous job was an assistant at Florida State. I would be OK with an assistant with good resume who has a vision as to how recruit and improve the program,,,,,,,,don't expect a miracle; just forward progress.

Don't know how long it takes to replace a volleyball coach. AU parted with Coach Nold on Dec 2. If you were going to force the current coach out then seems you would have some candidates in mind. Maybe the AD is still basking in the great performance of the football team down in Tampa and has been distracted. In 2018 Bama parted ways with their coach on 11/9 with 5 games remaining in the regular season. That year their SEC record was 7-11. On 12-18-18 They hired a new coach (Lindsey Devine from East Tennessee State) and this year finished with SEC record of 4-14. Seems we should hear something soon. Has anyone been tracking the AU planes to get a read on who we might be looking at? ✈️😄 Some of the top coaches I have checked on have been at their schools for 20+ years so likely difficult to pry a high profile coach away from an established program.

Maybe a continuation of some of the observations in my post above. Looking at the top 25 D1 teams at years end they are spread all over the country. If there is any concentration I would say it is in the large state of Texas where 4 teams are represented; Baylor, Texas, Texas A&M. and Rice. Otherwise there is quite a scattering of top 25 ranked teams (including Hawaii). Looked for top VB producing states and will include a couple of paragraphs from 2015 MaxPreps article Toughest States to Win High School Volleyball State Title. "One reason it has become so difficult to win high school volleyball state titles in California, Kentucky, Texas and Indiana is because of parity. Another is the year-round club impact that is creating more talent and experience at an earlier age. According to the MaxPreps Computer Rankings presented by the Army National Guard, 18 of the Top 25 teams come from California (six), Texas (seven), Indiana (three) and Kentucky (two). In the Top 50, 31 are from those states. And in the Top 100, more than half (58) come from Texas, California, Kentucky and Indiana. It simply doesn't get more challenging than that." Although being tall would not be the only attribute of a good VB net player we could probably agree there is some advantage to being the one breathing the thinnest air. I noticed that Stanford had 2 players listed at 6'6" and another at 6'5". Their star outside hitter Plummer at 6'6" had 22 kills during their domination of Baylor in the championship game. The Baylor roster listed 6'6" and 6'4" players. Closer to home the #10 Gators have players listed 6'6", 6'7" and 6'8". Auburn's two tallest listed players were a couple of outside hitters @ 6' and 6'4". It would also be helpful to have a lot of fast twitch fibers, explosive jumping and good court vision. Looked at April 2019 article from Volleyball Mag.com they had ranking to top 50 recruited high school players. Some of the text follows: " And as usual two of the biggest states in the land, Texas and California, landed the most players on the list. The Lone Star State led with nine entries on the Fab 50, while California was right behind with eight." " Stanford had the most Fab 50 recruits this time around with five, with Purdue, Ohio State, Nebraska and Oregon coming in strong with three each. Will these four find their way to the top of the VolleyballMag.com women’s recruiting class rankings that will follow in several weeks? Stay tuned." Seems it would be an advantage for a coach to have a recruiting connection with the above noted states and a reputation of developing talent to compete at the highest level. I don't know that AU can pull in a top tier coach. May have to take a chance on someone who has shown promise at some lower level. I would be satisfied with steady progress in that case.

Searching for list of best VB countries the names mentioned at the top seemed to be Brazil, USA, China, Russia, Serbia in no particular order. Looking at some of the top teams this year the Stanford roster has 8 players from California and interestingly 2 from Kentucky. They do have a player from Canada. Baylor roster 10 from Texas and 4 from California. Also 1 player from British Columbia and 1 from Netherlands. Wisconsin had most of their players from Wisconsin and Illinois at 5 each. Kentucky did not appear to have any concentration as far as recruiting area; they had 2 home state players, 3 from Texas and 2 from Wisconsin. So just from a random sampling of some of the top teams it would not appear that there is not much of an international flavor. California and Texas appear to be well represented. Like other sports, If your program is highly regarded then you attract highly regarded athletes. However, there may be some advantage to having international connections and not having to go head to head with other US programs for some of those top players. Maybe with most of our other programs being "stable" AD Green can give this hire adequate attention and attract a coach with a successful profile who can attract good players and be a promoter of the program.

Unlike some of the higher profile sports, I don't see any articles about who might a potential replacement for the volleyball HC position. Note we had #7 recruiting class for 2018 but don't know how many may have been in the transfer portal as Mickey mentioned above in the OP. Have no idea who may be a candidate at this point but looked at a couple of schools who have had success and are not what I would call high profile schools. A couple that were interesting were Towson and Costal Carolina. Towson (Maryland) plays in the Colonial Athletic Association and went to the 32 team field in the NCAA VB championship this year. They won their first game to advance to second round and lost to #11 Penn State (3-1). Their HC is Don Metil who was hired 2013. They ended this season 29-3.The prior 3 seasons the record was 17-15, 27-6 and 24-9. Costal Carolina is coached by Jozsef Forman since 2012. He is from Hungry and played on the Hungarian Junior Championship team. Overall record at Costal Carolina 156-67 (Sunbelt Conference). Their record this year was 24-6. Has won 4 conference championships which has led to being in the NCAA tournament 4 times. I presume his ties with Hungry has led to recruiting players from that area as this years team had players from Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Hungry and Serbia...…...Talk about out of state tuition. It would be nice if we could pull a coach from a top 25 NCAA D1 school but I don't have my hopes up. Thought I would look at a couple of coaches who may be under the radar so to speak. Maybe someone who actually knows about volleyball could enlighten us.

I had wondered the same and have been following the Auburn VB twitter page several times a week for any news. Now I realize that the D1 college VB championship tournament is taking place with the finals down to Stanford and Wisconsin. Hopeful that AD Green is looking at some coaches who had success in the tournament. If that is the case will need to exercise some more patience.

Had not heard Coach Nold had parted ways. Based on overall record we clearly need a change. Glad the AU AD is paying attention. Note in SEC this year the top 5 teams (SEC record) Florida 16-2 Kentucky 16-2 Missouri 13-5 TAM 13-5 Georgia 12-6 The bottom three were Alabama @ 4-14, Mississippi State @ 2-16 and Auburn @ 1-17. Looked up the top teams in country and found Stanford, Texas and Duke were considered top 3 but Florida and Missouri were in top 10. Let's hope we can interest a good coach to come in and improve our bottom of the pile program. Looked at a YouTube video of a mid-November game this year between Florida and Kentucky played at Florida. Kentucky won 3-2 with a close last game. What was evident was the number of fans at the game. No doubt, if you have a good product on the field/floor, people tend to support it. Also was surprised to see that the Florida Coach (Mary Wise) has a winning record of 0.887 and has been at the helm for 29 seasons. Sounds outstanding to me.

I did not know out VB team was so poor until I read this thread and looked at our record. As of today, we are 0 - 7 in SEC play. I have always felt VB was a good sport but admit I have not attended any games in person. Clearly need an upgrade in order to be competitive.

Updated the OP list with addition of Kendal Calvert an outfielder from New Palestine, Indiana who plays for Georgia Impact travel team. Her sister, Jaylin Calvert is a freshman outfielder for AU. Info from Flo softball.

Yes, we are still seeing some players who committed prior to enactment of the new rules not allowing contact and official visits prior to their junior year of high school. As regards pitching, Dismukes this year is highly regarded and two highly ranked pitchers are "scheduled" to sign this November for next years class so I am hopeful we will be developing some quality depth at that point. If someone in this years class steps up all the better. Jessie Blaine, listed above, has had some interesting articles and one caught my eye. It is lengthy so I will post the link only: https://www.insidenova.com/sports/prince_william/auburn-softball-commitment-jessie-blaine-gives-quantico-high-school-s/article_9a764e58-3438-11e9-92e2-d3319d2770b6.html

Recent post on the 2020 SB recruiting topic. I will add players I have on a list from earlier this year. As far as I can tell they are still committed. 2021 1B/3B Bri Ellis just committed to Auburn. She was a former Texas A&M commit. From the info I could find on her, in her two years and 60 total games of H.S. softball she has a BA of .414, 25 HR’s, and 82 RBI’s. Also one 2018 FloSoftball article said that Ellis hit 7 home runs in 10 games at the 2018 Tulsa Elite Shootout. My Additions: Abbey Smith, utility Aubrey Barnhart, C/3B Aubrie Lisenby, C (Thunderbolts) Jessie Blaine, C keri Munn, P Riley McNemar 2B/1B Rose Roach, SS/utility Rylie Moody, SS/2B Kendal Calvert, OF

Nice article in Auburn Undercover (free content) from June 9 " A Different Approach: Auburn's Myers Plans Return to WCWS". Sorry not to provide link....above my skill level. Discusses a change in batting philosophy as well as where and how some of the new players may fit in.

When I went to some of the fall practice sessions, I recall Ward at 3rd base in some of the drills and she looked very unsure of herself and appeared way behind the other new players. Joyner, on the other hand appeared to give a good account of herself at SS. I was surprised we did not see her worked in during some of the early games. May be a long term strategy? Guetiarrez likewise seemed to be picking up the system. Clearly there was no need to waste her this year with a couple of very good juniors in front of her. I agree with boomstick in that I am anxious to see Schiele as well as Snow. Some of these gals may allow us to play more of a small ball game when required. At times it seems to be a good approach against some of these elite pitchers.

Info regarding the 2018 class up on the Auburn Athletics site and the Auburn Softball Twitter site. Stated to be the #2 class. Good infusion of talent to go with the excellent 2017 class.

Anyone know anything about Kennedy Ward from Mobile. I saw that she is supposed to be a 2016 signee. Do not recall her name on the list that was released last December. Plays short stop in HS. Plays for the Thunderbolts club team.

Is there a stipulation that the head coach has to have a degree? I believe Cory has a while before he finishes his degree which would make it important for his dad to stay in place for at least that time period.