Gopher Volleyball 2016: NCAA Tournament

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Ignatius L Hoops

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Because....this team deserves a separate tournament thread!

http://www.ncaa.com/championships/volleyball-women/d1/road-to-the-championship


Road to the Championship


National Participation
There are 330 NCAA member institutions that sponsor Division I Women’s Volleyball teams and are eligible to compete in the National Championship. All 330 programs support over 5,500 Women’s Volleyball student-athletes across the country.

Selection Process
The 2016 Division I Women’s Volleyball championship provides for a field of 64 teams to compete in a single elimination tournament. Of the 64 teams, 32 teams will receive automatic qualification while the remaining 32 teams are selected on an at-large basis by the Division I Women’s Volleyball Committee.

Selection Show | Sunday, November 27, 2016 at 9 p.m. on ESPNU
The NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship bracket will be announced the Sunday before the first round of competition.

First and Second Rounds | December 1-3, 2016
First and Second round competition will be held at 16 non-predetermined campus sites. At each campus site, four teams will compete in single-elimination first round competition. The two advancing teams then compete against each other in single-elimination second round competition at the same campus site. The winning team from each of the 16 second rounds advances to the regional round.

Regionals | December 9-10, 2016
Regionals for the NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship will be held at four non-predetermined campus sites. At each site, four teams compete in single-elimination regional semifinal competition. The two advancing teams then compete against each other in single-elimination regional final. The winning team from each of the four regions will advance to the DI Women’s Volleyball Championship final site in Columbus, Ohio.

National Championship | December 15 and 17, 2016
The 2016 NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Championship will be held at Nationwide Arena in Columbus Ohio. The national semifinals will be held December 15 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m (ESPN2). The national championship will take place December 17 at 9 p.m. (ESPN2).
 

NB- #1, MN-#2. Friday we play ND with USC and HI. our bracket. Go Gophers !
 



First up is a Pav rematch with North Dakota. Minnesota won 3-1 back in September (25-12, 21-25, 25-20 and 25-18). Sets 2 and 3 were sloppy efforts for the Gophers. The Pav's mid-September heat and humidity are no longer a factor.

http://www.undsports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?ATCLID=211174351&DB_OEM_ID=13500


North Dakota gave third-ranked Minnesota fits as the Gophers pulled out a 3-1 win in their home opener during the first day of the Diet Coke Classic. UND dropped the first set, 25-12, but roared back with a 25-21 set-two win and forced Minnesota to hold off a pesky Fighting Hawk squad to earn the win in the fourth.

"Tonight was a loss, and that's nothing to be satisfied with, but I saw some good things," UND head coach Mark Pryor said. "First of all, when Chelsea Moser hits like she did and when Jordan Vail hits like she did, we proved to ourselves that we can sideout with anybody. Second, when we continued to battle a team like that, I think that's a good sign for the future."

Senior Chelsea Moser paved the way for UND statistically, generating a team-best 13 kills on just 24 swings without an error. Jordan Vail added nine kills while Sydney Griffin chipped in 37 assists.

Minnesota, who advanced to the NCAA Final Four last season and was opening its home schedule tonight, had a crowd of 4,271 in a frenzy in the first set and rode that wave to a convincing 25-12 win in that opening frame.

But, UND (7-6) was unfazed, turning a 9-7 deficit into a 15-9 lead with eight straight points in the second set. North Dakota would not look back in that set, eventually winning, 25-21, as Moser and Vail combined for eight kills on just 15 swings without an error in that set alone.

The teams battled through 11 tie scores and the lead changed hands seven times in a tight third set, but Minnesota persevered to grab a 25-20 win and a 2-1 lead in the match.

Minnesota had to fend off one final UND rally as it was 23-11 but a 7-1 spurt forced the Gophers to exhaust a timeout before winning the set and the match, 25-18.
 


We do get to welcome back Gopher great Lindsey Berg who is in her first year as an assistant for the Rainbow Wahine.

http://hawaiiathletics.com/coaches.aspx?rc=1881&path=wvball

Assistant coach Lindsey Berg begins her first season with the Rainbow Wahine squad. It is a homecoming for Berg who was born and raised in Honolulu. She is a three-time U.S. Olympic team setter who helped lead the U.S. squad as the team captain to silver medals in 2008 and 2012. Berg was named the USA Volleyball Female Indoor Athlete of the Year in both 2008 and 2011 and was named the Best Setter at the North Central and Caribbean Volleyball (NORCECA) Championships (2005, ‘11); the Pan American Cup (2003, ‘04, ‘05) and earned the All-USPV Outstanding Server and Outstanding Setter award in 2002.

After graduating from Punahou School in 1998, Berg matriculated to Minnesota where she was a three-time All-Big Ten selection. She set a new Golden Gopher record for career assists and is ranked third in the Big Ten in all-time assists with 5,913. Berg earned her bachelor’s degree in business marketing in 2001 from Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

Berg played professionally both in the U.S. (Minnesota Chill of the USPV in 2002) and abroad. She played eight years in Italy for three teams: Scavolini Pesaro (2004-07); Asystel Novara (2007-08); and MC-Carnaghi Villa Cortese (2009-12) and also played for Fenerbache in Istanbul in 2013.

Most recently, Berg served as a volunteer assistant at Dartmouth last season where she trained the setters; helped with the team offense and game strategy as well as leadership development.
 

MissouriGopher said:
Tough sub-regional
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Texas coach Jerritt Elliot agrees:

http://volleyballmag.com/ncaafield/

Certainly the top 16 teams have a first- and second-round advantage and certainly the top four are in a good situation if they advance.

One of those four is Texas. Coach Jerritt Elliott, whose team won it all in 2012 and is trying to get back to the national semifinals for the fifth consecutive season, knows no one has it easy.

“I’m blown away by Minnesota’s bracket. I think it’s the most brutal bracket of all,” Elliott said.

“I was surprised that Penn State snuck in there and got a top 16 seed and now Nebraska’s got to play them in the sweet 16. They can’t be that happy about that. There are some tough draws.
 







MRJ said:
For what it's worth (not much at this point), the ladies are also the new No. 1 in the latest AVCA poll.

https://www.avca.org/polls/di-women/11-28-2016.html
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That's what happens when you beat #1 and #3 in the same week. That said, Nebraska deserves it more than us. Better record and they won the conference. That said, they got gifted with Penn St in their region, we get Hawaii in our second game and Texas has a cake walk to the final four. Weird choices by the league, but to win a title you have to beat good teams. So I'm not going to sweat it.
 

http://www.twincities.com/2016/11/29/ncaa-volleyball-five-reasons-gophers-could-win-it-all/

The subregional will be something of a reunion of Gopher setters, starting with Samantha Seliger-Swenson, who was named Big Ten setter of the year Tuesday. The team’s backup, Erica Handley, also will be there, along with former setter Katie Schau, who has shifted to being a defensive specialist. So will Mia Tabberson, a player on the Gophers team that advanced to the Final Four in 2009, who is now an assistant coach at North Dakota, and Lindsey Berg, the Gophers’ setter from 1999-2001 who is now an assistant coach for Hawaii. Berg knows Gopher coach Hugh McCutcheon well — as a player, she captained the team he coached to a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics.

They’re all watching tape and practicing this week, with an eye toward the Final Four in Columbus, Ohio, on Dec. 17-19. As the Gophers prepare, here are five things to watch for as the team enters the 64-team NCAA tournament:


LOW-ERROR SYSTEM

Speaking of errors, reigning American Volleyball Coaches Association coach-of-the-year Hugh McCutcheon’s system, which is built around minimizing mistakes, took the team to the Final Four last season and could do it again. The Gophers have plenty of offensive firepower — Wilhite is a national player-of-the-year candidate — but they deploy their big guns judiciously and, if it looks like the kill isn’t there at any given point, the Gophers are adept at keeping the ball in play until they can blast it or their opponents make mistakes.

One play early in the fourth set against Wisconsin on Saturday summed up how effectively the players execute this system and wear down opponents. Wilhite was set four times during the same point: a powerful attempt that was blocked back by the Badgers, a well-placed shot without much heat that the Badgers returned, a ball Wilhite placed to avoid the block but that Wisconsin returned again and, finally, when Wilhite saw the block in front of her on her fourth attempt was not well-formed, she banged it in between the upraised hands of two Badgers.

Adding up attacks, serves, blocks and service reception, Minnesota is the lowest-error team in the conference, and it’s not even close. For example, the Gophers are the only Big Ten team with more service aces than errors, and their total number of serve errors, 94, is half the number committed by the next lowest team, Nebraska (190), even though the Gophers have more aces than the Cornhuskers, the NCAA tournament’s No. 1 overall seed.

If the Gophers can get past North Dakota, whom they beat 3-1 in September, they will need to serve tough to keep the ball away from Hawaii’s tall front line. Expected to beat USC in Friday’s opening round, the Rainbow Wahine are led by another candidate for national player of the year, 6-foot-4 right-side hitter Nikki Taylor, who hammered 23 kills in last year’s meeting with Minnesota.
 



Anybody selling Volleyball tickets?

Would love to buy if you have a couple. Preferably the chairback seats!

Go Gophs!
 

Five reasons why Minnesota could win it all

All-Big Ten Conference middle blocker Hannah Tapp was the one who decided to go there during a news conference early this season, saying: "I came to Minnesota to win a national championship."

The Gophers (25-4), ranked No. 1 in the final coaches' poll and seeded second overall in the NCAA tournament, begin their push to a national championship this week. They will face University of North Dakota (26-9) at 7 p.m. Friday at the Sports Pavilion, where they would play all four of their pre-Final Four tournament matches if they keep winning.

In addition to Minnesota and North Dakota, the sub-regional features Southern California (18-13) and a familiar foe in Hawaii (22-5), whom the Gophers beat last season to advance to the Final Four. USC and Hawaii play at 5:30 p.m. Friday.

The subregional will be something of a reunion of Gopher setters, starting with Samantha Seliger-Swenson, who was named Big Ten setter of the year Tuesday. The team's backup, Erica Handley, also will be there, along with former setter Katie Schau, who has shifted to being a defensive specialist. So will Mia Tabberson, a player on the Gophers team that advanced to the Final Four in 2009, who is now an assistant coach at North Dakota, and Lindsey Berg, the Gophers' setter from 1999-2001 who is now an assistant coach for Hawaii. Berg knows Gopher coach Hugh McCutcheon well -- as a player, she captained the team he coached to a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics.

They're all watching tape and practicing this week, with an eye toward the Final Four in Columbus, Ohio, on Dec. 17-19. As the Gophers prepare, here are five things to watch for as the team enters the 64-team NCAA tournament:

http://www.ncaa.com/news/volleyball...yball-five-reasons-why-minnesota-could-win-it

Go Gophers!!
 

Sparlimb said:
That's what happens when you beat #1 and #3 in the same week. That said, Nebraska deserves it more than us. Better record and they won the conference. That said, they got gifted with Penn St in their region, we get Hawaii in our second game and Texas has a cake walk to the final four. Weird choices by the league, but to win a title you have to beat good teams. So I'm not going to sweat it.
Click to expand...

My feelings exactly. Forget rankings or seeds. You have to beat good teams to win it all, regardless of when and where you play them. The rest will take care of itself.
 

GopherGoldy4 said:
Anybody selling Volleyball tickets?

Would love to buy if you have a couple. Preferably the chairback seats!

Go Gophs!
Click to expand...

Match is sold out but it looks like stubhub still has tickets.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 


In the Minnesota region:

Purdue made short work of Iowa State: 24, 21, 13
And 15th seeded Missouri, likewise, zipped past Northern Illinois, 16, 13, 20.

They will meet tomorrow night.
 

http://www.startribune.com/gophers-...-learns-to-unleash-her-inner-beast/404159786/

StarTrib article on Sarah Wilhite:

“Feeding the beast is what [assistant coach] Matt Houk tells me to do,” Seliger-Swenson said. “That’s just the player Sarah is for this team. When she gets five kills in a row, I’m going to continue going to her, because I know she’s so confident. She can put the ball away.”

That’s a relatively new development for a player who came to the U as more of a lamb than a lion. Off the court, Wilhite remains a soft-spoken individual happy to pass all the credit to her teammates. But discovering her inner beast has made the senior a more consistent and complete player, a transformation that earned her the Big Ten’s player of the year award this week as the top-ranked Gophers prepared for Friday’s NCAA tournament opener against North Dakota...

..Her all-around efficiency has increased with her confidence. Always a fundamentally sound player, Wilhite arrived as a quiet, introverted freshman whose potential spoke louder than her personality. She described her game as immature, with a limited range of shots, but she was hungry to expand her understanding of her position.


Wilhite credited her coaches with building her into a more complete player. In turn, McCutcheon praised her for improving her mental toughness and being willing to push herself. This season, he said, he challenged her to become a six-rotation player — a heavy responsibility — and to eliminate lapses in her play. She did so by learning to relish competition, which helped her make daily improvements in practice and prepared her to take charge in a match.

“The change has been significant,” McCutcheon said. “I think the biggest shift is her mental approach to competition: how she sees herself relative to the team and our opponent, and what she can do to help us win the next point.
 


Not sure what the Vball team is doing so far, but 17-17 in first set and they are playing far from a top-3 team in the nation. The only player playing up to her potential is, perhaps, Wilhite thus far.

Update: Gophers take first set 25-21. 1-0. Go Gophers!

Update: Gophers smash N. Dakota in the second set. 2-0!
 


Probably wasn't the most impressive match of the year but after beating two excellent teams within a week I'm sure it was hard to maintain that focus/emotion for ND. As long as they won I'm happy and I'm sure they will pick it up again.
 

By midway through the fifth set I'd seen quite enough of Hawaii's Nikki Taylor; apparently, she wanted to hang around another day. I'd like a nice boring Gopher win; but the needle is leaning toward raucous.
 

http://www.startribune.com/u-makes-quick-work-of-fighting-hawks-to-open-ncaa-volleyball/404381776/#1

10-0; I couldn't think of a longer run this season-or most seasons for that matter.


We came out strong, then we let them creep in a little bit,” Wilhite said. “For the second set, we made it a goal to stay strong for the entire set. I think we did that. We kept pushing back and didn’t let up at all.”

With Seliger-Swenson serving to start the second set, the Gophers rolled to a 10-0 lead. They demonstrated their determination on one long, scrambling point, chasing down balls all over the court before Lohman and Paige Tapp ended it with a stout block on Chelsea Moser. The Fighting Hawks could not catch up as they finished the set with nine attack errors and only seven kills.
 

cncmin said:
Apparently on BTN Plus we are getting...a feed from North Dakota announcers? Admittedly, far better than none at all, but really?
Click to expand...

The announcers were the Student U announcers that did all the home games this year.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 

#2Gopher said:
Probably wasn't the most impressive match of the year but after beating two excellent teams within a week I'm sure it was hard to maintain that focus/emotion for ND. As long as they won I'm happy and I'm sure they will pick it up again.
Click to expand...

Just happy it was 3 sets. We need all our energy for tonight.
 

Ignatius L Hoops said:
By midway through the fifth set I'd seen quite enough of Hawaii's Nikki Taylor; apparently, she wanted to hang around another day. I'd like a nice boring Gopher win; but the needle is leaning toward raucous.
Click to expand...

I think if we're going to lose before the final four, tonight is it. That said, I think the home crowd will see us through. Only one Big Ten team out so far (if my glance at the bracket was right). Purdue lost last night in the 2nd round. So Big Ten was 8-0 in first round games and 9-1 overall so far. San Diego, who had a fantastic year, lost last night to Baylor in what must be considered an upset.
 

If you want better announcers for tonights Hawaii vs. Minnesota match, the TV station covering Hawaii should have a free stream again. It was mostly good during the Hawaii/USC match, a handful of lags but thats about it.

www.hawaiiathletics.com/watch/?Live=28
 

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