NCAA volleyball: Landfair to Nebraska; transfers galore; coaching carousel spins on
Our holiday hiatus is over, but volleyball didn’t care.
Not even on January 1, when the rest of the sports world was focused on football.
No, on Monday the 2022 Big Ten player of the year and a first-team VolleyballMag.com All-American, Taylor Landfair, said she was transferring to Nebraska.
It comes on the heels of a season in which Landfair and her team struggled and the 6-foot-5 outside hitter saw her stats drop considerably. More on Landfair and others making moves follows.
Since our last report there were coaching hires, conference moves by the Pac-2, and a disturbing story about Idaho volleyball by the Orange County Register.
Taylor Landfair and her Minnesota teammates walking into their NCAA match at Creighton/Kelly Hagenson photo
Rush hour in the transfer portal
Landfair is headed to Nebraska, a team that lost in the NCAA national title match to Texas with no seniors. There were four outside hitters on that roster, including VBM second-team All-American freshman Harper Murray, juniors Ally Batenhorst and Lindsay Krause, and sophomore Hayden Kubik, who has entered the portal herself.
In 2022, Landfair had 479 kills (4.35/set) and hit .257 to go with 25 aces and 72 blocks. This past season, she had 361 kills in three more sets played (3.19/set), 35 aces and 54 blocks. She had her best digs total of her career, 229 (2.03).
It would be hard to imagine Landfair not taking the other outside spot opposite Murray.
Worth noting is that Texas outside hitter Jenna Wenaas is a Minnesota transfer, and so was Carter Booth, the starting middle for Wisconsin, which Texas beat in the national semifinals.
After Texas — with a roster that for the second straight championship year was loaded with key transfers — beat Nebraska, the last question of the post-match news conference went to Cook:
“In what ways has Texas set the bar that you and other teams have to match now?” he was asked.
The veteran coach, who has won NCAA titles in 2000, 2006, 2015 and 2017, replied:
“I’ve got to think about that. But you look at tonight’s match, I mean, they’ve got half their starting team are transfers. They’re all fourth- and fifth-year players, except for Ella, the setter, who did a great job.
“So that’s how they’ve been building their team. That’s how they built last year’s team. I like what we’re doing. I like recruiting kids and trying to make them be great.”
As VBM contributor Lincoln Arneal noted in Huskers Illustrated: Last year’s (Nebraska) team featured Florida transfer Merritt Beason, who earned first-team All-American honors. Previous teams included middle blocker Kaitlyn Hord (Penn State), middle blocker Kayla Caffey (Missouri) and outside hitter Lexi Sun (Texas).
Kubik is not the only Husker leaving. Redshirt freshman right side Caroline Jurevicius has transferred to Penn State and junior middle Maggie Mendelson, who also played basketball, is in the portal.
But the transfer portal is like Ginsu Knives. Wait, there’s more …
The biggest move before Landfair was Reagan Rutherford from Kentucky to Texas. Rutherford, who will be a grad student, is a left-handed right side and a VBM fourth-team All-American who will replace Molly Phillips at Texas. Phillips is moving on to play beach at USC.
Texas is also getting Baylor’s Averi Carlson, a 5-11 setter who will be a junior. She will back up Texas setter Ella Swindle, a freshman who had a breakout NCAA Tournament.
A big setter move was made by Argentina Ung, a grad student who is not from Argentina but Mexico. She transferred to Arizona State. The 6-footer had her best season in 2023 for a Washington State team that made it to the third round of the NCAA Tournament. She was an AVCA honorable-mention All-American and has Mexican national-team experience. ASU also picked up West Virginia outside Bailey Miller. She led the Mountaineers in kills in 2022 and was second this past season with 339.
Wisconsin’s Ella Wrobel, a 6-4 outside hitter and like Landfair from Plainfield, Illinois, has transferred to Ohio State. Wrobel played in nine sets in 2022 and did not play in 2023.
Coaching carousel
Shannon Hunt is headed to Nevada.
Hunt has spent her whole life in Washington, the past 13 years at Washington State, where she was an assistant to Jen Greeny, her former WSU teammate. Greeny left to take over at West Virginia and WSU was left without the Pac-12.
Hunt, a star outside at Washington State, coached at two different high schools in Washington before rejoining Greeny in Pullman in 2011.
Hunt replaces Lee Nelson, the coach for nine years. Last season, Nevada finished 7-22, 3-15 in the Mountain West.
Radford hired Chris Hertel, who had been an assistant at the Virginia school from 2011-18. He spent the past five seasons as an assistant at his alma mater, New Mexico State. Radford finished 6-17 last season, 5-9 in the Big South. Sherisa Livingston then resigned after four seasons.
Among the jobs still open is Northwestern of the Big Ten.
WSU, OSU to WCC
The Pac-12 is no more. The Pac-2 had to do something. The news release from the West Coast Conference:
The West Coast Conference has announced the addition of Oregon State University and Washington State University as affiliate members across 12 sports for a two-year term, beginning with the 2024-25 academic year.
The WCC extended invitations to OSU and WSU in 12 sports, with both institutions set to compete as affiliate members in men’s basketball, women’s basketball, women’s soccer, volleyball, men’s golf, women’s golf, women’s cross country and women’s rowing. Oregon State will also participate in the Conference in men’s soccer and softball, and Washington State will also compete in the WCC in women’s tennis and men’s cross country.
Disturbing report about Idaho
Veteran and award-winning investigative sportswriter Scott M. Reid wrote a damning piece that published Saturday in the Orange County Register about Idaho coach Chris Gonzalez.
From the story:
The incident is part of a pattern of alleged abuse by Gonzalez, a former U.S. national team coach, outlined to the Southern California News Group by six Idaho players on the 2023 roster, three former players, and a university employee, who allege Gonzalez physically abused and bullied players, pressured injured players to play and train against the orders of the school’s sports medicine staff, regularly deprived players of food on road trips, body shamed players, made racially insensitive and inappropriate comments to players, and pressured sports medicine staff to share confidential information about players’ weight.
In interviews, letters, emails, formal complaints, confidential university documents and voice recordings of Gonzalez, athletic director Terry Gawlik, and other athletic department and university administration officials, the players allege that Gonzalez, a longtime fixture on the Southern California volleyball scene and once considered one of the college game’s rising coaching stars, has created an environment where he targets specific players for almost daily bullying and even physical abuse, where players suffered dozens of avoidable injuries from overtraining or because he ignored the instructions of doctors, trainers and a sports biomechanics expert, withheld food from the team to the point where all nine current and former players said they were constantly hungry and routinely played and practiced while feeling light-headed or dizzy, suffered tunnel vision, and often felt that they were on the verge of passing out or blacking out.
Click here for the entire story:
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