Women's volleyball in age of parity

By Ann Miller
Advertiser Staff Writer

DALLAS — Unbeaten Southern California comes to the 23rd NCAA Women's Volleyball Championship this week with a No. 1 ranking, NCAA-record 45-match winning streak and intimate knowledge of how draining it is to try and defend a title. Hawai'i, Florida and Minnesota are here to tell you precisely how tough it is to win one at all.

Hawai'i was the first team to defend an NCAA women's volleyball title, in 1982 and '83. Coaches that were around then and now speak of that period two decades ago as if it was the Dark Ages.

The belief is that a 14th-ranked team such as Minnesota, which plays USC in one semifinal tomorrow at Reunion Center, never could have upset its way into the final four back then — especially after falling in its first four matches of the season. And third-ranked Florida, which takes on second-ranked Hawai'i in the other semifinal, was too far removed from the prized recruits to be a serious challenger, let alone an annual threat.

Now, no one is quite sure what to expect. There is too much talent across the country to allow a few teams to dominate a decade at a time, or win without playing their best volleyball this week.

"Those days are gone," said Terry Pettit, who guided Nebraska to the title in 1995 and now works as a volleyball consultant. "You have to play your best volleyball now. Kids move around the country a little less. Maybe 10 years ago, seven or eight programs had almost all the best players.

"To be in the final four, you have to have three or four exceptional athletes, but there's much more likelihood now that a Top-30 or Top-50 program will have an exceptional athlete than there was 10 years ago."

Hawai'i's Dave Shoji said he also believes the days of building a team around one terminator, as he did when Teee Williams took his team to the championship match in 1988, are long gone.

The supporting cast is much more crucial now because the balance of power is so much more widespread. And supporting players take time to season.

"Stars are stars early, usually by their sophomore year," Shoji said, but role players improve immensely over their careers. The changes might be subtle, but the impact in December is dramatic.

"If they're seniors and they're doing the little things that make them better than, say, a freshman role player, that's what makes the difference in being able to win," Shoji said. "You pretty much know what you're going to get out of the stars. It's the others. For us, it's people like Nohea Tano and Lauren Duggins, who are so much better than they were two or three years ago, who make the difference."

The Rainbow Wahine won the first seven final-four matches they played, capturing NCAA titles in 1982, '83 and '87 before falling to Texas in the 1988 final. They didn't make it back to the final week until 1996, when they beat Florida in the semifinals before losing to Stanford.

Since then, the bumpy road to the final four has still been smoother than the actual arrival. Nebraska took them out in 2000 and Stanford swept them last year.

Now, Hawai'i hopes the desire of its seven seniors and the painful final-four lessons they have learned will make the difference, just as Penn State's core of seniors finally rose to the occasion in 1998 after devastating final-four losses the previous two years.

"The last two years motivated me," Penn State setter Bonnie Bremner said when she won in Honolulu five years ago. "I can't get those back. I lived with that everyday. I wanted to live with something else, something better."

There are other reasons teams succeed at the final four. Florida coach Mary Wise said she believes a team must have "the best player the final week" to win.

Someone dynamic such as Hawai'i's Kim Willoughby or the Gators' Aury Cruz or Minnesota's Cassie Busse. Or several someones, such as the staggering assortment of talent possessed by USC. The Trojans have been so dominant the past two seasons that at last year's All-American Banquet, Hawai'i's Lily Kahumoku joked she hadn't seen that many gifted players since "USC played last night."

To win, a team also has to be healthy and upbeat, as Hawai'i painfully discovered in '96 and last year when Angelica Ljungquist and Kahumoku were shadows of their All-American selves because of the flu. Distractions and personal issues need to be minor enough to be overcome.

"Very rarely do I see a team that is not well-coached," Pettit said. "It comes down to the level of athleticism and experience and whether or not that team has a special quality about it. The special quality frequently does not come down to coaching, it comes down to genetics."

It also comes down to "not how well you play, but how long you can play well," according to Pettit. Champions roll with the punches that come during an unpredictable week, and have the drive to roll over the obstacles that will always appear.

Reach Ann Miller at amiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8043.

Oceanic will show match live

Advertiser Staff

Oceanic Cable will broadcast tomorrow's NCAA final four volleyball match between Florida and Hawai'i live on OC-16.

The match will be played in Dallas' Reunion Arena at 4:30 p.m. It'll be rebroadcast at 8:30 p.m.