McCamish was wild. I think it's time for the ladies to get a bigger place... The problem is it's gonna be really hard to expand O'Keefe due to the logistics (def can't expand to the interstate side) and $$$. But the atmosphere today was electric.
Thoughts about the game. The first set was competitive. 2nd set was not. 3rd set, I thought we finally found this "something" that made things click and may be even the turning point of the season and something we can carry on henceforth. Bergmann and others were on fire... it was a scary ending to the set but we still won set 3. The 4th set started with us being behind 7-8 points, but the Jackets showed 2 rallies and at one point took Pitt's lead down to 4. The crowd was going nuts. The coaches tried new things, bringing in Drewnick, Marmen, Schiffer, and also Patterson as the 2nd defensive player, and bringing in Harper/Marmen combo to replace Otene from the 3rd(?) set. I'm not pinning anything on Otene but in late 2nd set, I thought we really had a chance to win when both teams surpassed 20 points and an otherwise out of bounds ball from a long rally hit Otene's foot despite her trying to move out of the way. Unlucky. We would have taken the lead and who knows what might have happened after.
Let me be honest here... I am not a volleyball expert by any means... just a big fan that's watched this team for a long time and rode the exciting wave of this team rising to the top over the last few years. I feel this year's team has hit the ceiling with some of the issues that occur each game. Serve receive and service errors are still there, especially at critical times, and the setting game continues to be the big issue. Surely the coaches know what they're doing so I continue to wonder each game why the extremely low sets are not getting better. The long sets across the net (left/right, right/left) tend to be high and good but the short sets are always really low. In the Louisville match a week prior, the color commentator, Kevin Barnett was quite frank about the issues with sets and how low they were or how out of position they where that the attackers didn't have many options for clean kills. If you look on the Pitt side today, there were many kills that started from the high point at a such an acute angle that it shot straight to the floor... there's no way to defend those... and we have had those type of kills in the past years - I remember Kaiser doing these back in 2019, 2020... and Moss and Morrissette through this year. The sets simply don't get high enough for our hitters to do this. It's like the issues we had with the FG unit on the football side and now the punting unit. Until we address this issue, I feel that we'll continue to sweep the middle and bottom teams of ACC but we cannot win against really good teams.
Officiating was at times downright atrocious. I was sitting right behind Collier's hubby and friends... and they can see a violation as soon as it happened. There were non-calls for double touch and Pitt hitting when our setter was trying to set (not really sure about this one since I hadn't watched the replay)... these non-calls really killed our comback effort in late 4th set.
Kudos to the Jackets... they fought really really hard. Bergmann had a slow start but finished with a solid 25 kills, followed by Bertilono and Morissette with 8 each. Harper showed signs of promise... hope she gets more playing time and her experience now can become a factor next year. Buzzerio (#8) and Gomez (#2) from Pitt had fantastic games. We're definitely missing the other Bergmann this year in not having Brambilla (esp those signature backcourt attacks, hard to defend).
Curious what others thought of the game...