Rainbow Wahine, UNC meet in semifinal match

By Ann Miller
Advertiser Staff Writer

LINCOLN, Neb. — North Carolina has advanced into volleyball's vast unknown, boldly gone where no Tar Heels have gone before. They play second-ranked Hawai'i today in their first NCAA regional, at the Nebraska Coliseum. UNC seniors Laura Greene, Eve Rackham, Holly Strauss and Malaika Underwood never doubted it would come to this.

North Carolina (32-3) upset Wisconsin the first week of the season and eventually rose to No. 11 in the Coaches Top 25, the highest ranking of any Atlantic Coast Conference volleyball team in history. It is also the first ACC team in the Sweet 16 since 1994.

While the Tar Heels simplified their mission statement by the Atlantic Ocean, Rainbow Wahine coach Dave Shoji was searching for a way to ease the pressure for his team in the Pacific. It seemed as if "volleyball" couldn't be mentioned in Hawai'i without "final four" following. Everyone expected his team to win everything.

He decided to de-emphasize winning. Ultimately it would always be the goal anyway. His focus all season has been on trying to help his players "embrace the moment" and find a place where they could play to their potential without the burden of everyone else's expectations. In that "zone" he felt they could win.

"We've worked hard since spring and summer, just let it all out now," is the way senior Hedder Ilustre describes the Rainbow Wahine's attitude. "We went hard all this time, don't let go in the end."

Today, one team intent on winning and another intent on zoning in on its fifth national championship will play for the right to meet fourth-ranked Nebraska or 24th-ranked Miami in tomorrow's Central Regional final. That winner goes to the final four. Everyone else goes home with the other 300 or so teams whose seasons have already ended.

The Tar Heels feel no pressure. "Not too many expect us to win except the 16 on our team," says Greene, the ACC Player of the Year. "We've got nothing to lose."

In many other ways, North Carolina looks just like Hawai'i (32-1). Greene and Molly Pyles, their outside hitters, are not imposing but they provide the bulk of the offense just as All-Americans Lily Kahumoku and Kim Willoughby do for the Rainbows. Rackham, an all-region setter, gets the ball to everyone else just enough to make the outsides effective.

The Tar Heels also live and die with their defense, content to touch balls and dig them in transition rather than stuff teams into submission. They have held 24 teams to sub-.200 hitting; in their three losses, opponents hit .245 or better. Both teams expect long rallies into the cold Nebraska night tonight.

North Carolina has been to the last five NCAA Tournaments, a streak that started when Punahou graduate Erin Berg led it into the 1998 postseason after a nine-year absence. But only last year, after getting swept in the second round at Chapel Hill, did coach Joe Sagula sense his team was ready to break into the big time.

"As soon as we lost to Pepperdine a number of players came up to me and said, 'Coach, we're going top 16 next year.' You could just feel the difference," Sagula recalled. "Never before had the team collectively said we can do it and we want to do it. The belief came from these seniors who had played in three NCAA Tournaments. Any team's success is driven by senior leadership. If those four had said they were just happy to be in the tournament we'd have been gone last week."

Those seniors are what scare Shoji about North Carolina. But his greatest concern is with his team, as it has been from the moment the final-four pressure began to pile on one year ago today. He hopes his players can embrace these upcoming moments as they have nearly every previous moment this season.

"I think we've got more talent than North Carolina," Shoji says, "so we've just got to make sure that they earn points and we don't give them points."