VolleyMike

The loss of Morton, Anderson, Kemp, and Sinness is definitely concerning and will undoubtedly affect us. The lineup changes made last season (why mess with a young lineup that nearly got you to the sweet 16 only a few months prior?) and a lack of in game adjustments by the coaching staff all season is more concerning.

Looks like Auburn VB will be playing at a tournament next Saturday (3/30) at Georgia Tech. Should be a good early look at the team. All times EST 10:00AM - Virginia 11:20AM - Tennessee 2:00PM - Georgia Southern 4:45PM - Georgia Tech

Sad to see her go. She was an early signee in last years class and made a huge impact in last years back row. I think she was battling an injury most of this season. Surprised to see her removed from the roster on the website already. Cassidy Tanton was also not on there anymore.

Height definitely matters, but not at the expense of quickness and athleticism. If you’re going up to block and the ball is already past you, it doesn’t matter how tall you are, you are not going to affect that play. We saw A LOT of this all season with teams that ran faster offenses. Especially with our middles. When a kill goes cross court it is typically because there was an opening in the middle somewhere. Middles have a very hard job, but we seemed to struggle more than most. To me the bigger problem was the lack of adjustments by the coaching staff. Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Western Michigan, and others were all games that we struggled in and yet we kept running the same lineup and game plan out on the court set after set to see if it would somehow get better. When a player is struggling, sometimes the best thing you can do for them is to pull them out to let them regroup and get their confidence back. The worst thing you can do is to leave them in and let them implode in front of everyone. The second worst thing you can do is to put a backup in and pull the backup out right away if they make a mistake. Now you have two players with low confidence. I’m not saying we should use kid gloves with our players, but sometimes great players have B or C games and coaches need to recognize that and not be afraid to make changes.

Didn’t seem like we made any meaningful adjustments the entire match. Clearly had a few players that were off, but didn’t pull them out to give anyone else a shot. Don’t we have a super deep bench of talent?

Two straight matches with not a single adjustment made by the coaching staff. Makes no sense.

Awesome crowd Auburn family! That is all I have to say about tonight’s game against KY.

It is hard to ignore the red card in the 2nd set. It was a bad call by the refs for sure, but getting a red card when you’re up on the #3 team in the nation…. that’s just not smart nor representative of Auburn Volleyball. The score was 23-18 and we would have been serving to get to set point. Instead, Crouch’s red card kills all our momentum, gives Florida a point, and the serve! They then go on to score 7 of the next 8 points and win 26-24. Win that set and we would have likely swept them in 3.

The entire team seemed really out of sorts against MTSU. Serving was off, passing was off, setting wasn’t quite as crisp (likely due to passing issues), and hitting just wasn’t terminating as normal (again, somewhat attributed to deficits leading up to the hit). That being said, MTSU had extremely good passers and defense in general. They were playing “rotational defense” which is hard to pull off well, but if you do, it is very hard for off speed, tips, and hits to find the floor. If we played them 10 times, I think we probably win 8 or 9 of those. It just wasn’t our day and I don’t really think it would have been much different had Andersen been on the court. The really positive thing I saw was the impact of our bench. Quite honestly, I did not see much of a drop off at all. They brought a ton of energy to the court and both Zimmerman and Harmon had phenomenal matches across all phases of the game against CSU and Mercer. In addition, Scheer continued to put in her usual extremely solid performance, Kemp was a blocking machine, and Barrett distributed the ball really well and even hit Zimmerman out of the back row several times which was very effective. The back row play of Slaughter, Lanham, and Morton has consistently been rising all year and I no longer assume any ball is going to hit the ground on our side of the net. They are just too good. I hope we continue to see Crouch use/rotate his bench as the season progresses because the chemistry level on the court was very high last weekend and giving more players time on the court will keep the intensity and engagement levels high in practice. Looking forward to the matches this weekend! Some early RPI projections have Alabama Southern ahead of Auburn, so todays match is a big one.

Big win for the program for sure. That will help in November when we are securing our tournament bid. I see no reason we aren’t 11-0 heading into Florida and SEC play.

Definitely not a great showing. GT was ready to play and they looked really good. Set 2 was a great battle, but the rest of the match was pretty lopsided. I was surprised to see so much court time from our transfers. Might have just been the coaches wanting more looks at the new players in game like scenarios. I just hope we can find the elite team chemistry from last season, because it wasn’t there in Atlanta.

Great Orange/Blue scrimmage last night! Love the new court!!! There is so much depth on the roster now (clearly backed up by the tight set scores). Coaching staff has a lot of options and it will be interesting to see how they choose to use the roster across sets and throughout the season. I have no idea who the front runners are at literally any position. Looking forward to today’s exhibition match against #20 Georgia Tech. When they played in the Spring we were experimenting heavily with the lineup and they pretty much stuck with their starters. GT was playing to win, we were playing to learn and improve. I would imagine we start this match with what the coaches believe is our best lineup and sub in where we aren’t having success. However, you never know! Since this is still an exhibition, Brent may just have specific lineups he wants to test out today regardless of the score. Whichever route they go, it will be good to see how we stack up. I am sure GT will be playing to win.

I think we will do better than “mid-pack” this season.

Nebraska just sold out 82,900 seats in Memorial Stadium in 48 hours for a volleyball match against UNO this coming August. What is it going to take to sell out Neville for an Auburn volleyball home match?

Yes. Crouch wants to bring home an SEC title in the next 2-3 years and make a serious run into the NCAA tourney. Time will tell, but he has all the pieces to make it happen. His staff is top notch too. Before the game yesterday he showed some of the stats they created where his staff literally broke down over 2,200 SEC swings to analyze the amount of time that elapsed between the time the setter released the ball until the hitter made contact. They did this to determine the optimal time to get the highest percentage of kills. This Fall, Auburn will be averaging 0.8 seconds. This is probably down from around 1.0-1.2 seconds last year. The amount of work required to figure that out is crazy and now every set and hit in practice has a timer on it. Speed wins at the elite level and Crouch is pushing his team to get there quickly. Crouch is also a guy that clearly values team chemistry as his team gets along really, really, really well on and off the court. That chemistry is what allowed them to win matches last year they probably should have lost. I don’t think there is a better coach in the SEC.