High-flying No. 13 Arkansas, fueled by “small, mighty people,” has won 12 in a row
Arkansas coach Jason Watson addresses his team/Arkansas Athletics
“I may be the tallest, but the people around me make me feel small because they’re mighty. I have some small, mighty people around me.”
— Arkansas middle Zoi Evans
This story actually has a back story, but ultimately it’s about Arkansas, a simply scrappy, undersized, fun team to watch that happens to be really good — No. 13 in the VolleyballMag.com Super 16 Media Poll — and one that is riding a 12-match winning streak and just one of two SEC teams still unbeaten in league play.
Before getting to the 2023 Razorbacks, however, here’s the back story.
One year and a few weeks ago, Arkansas visited Baton Rouge to play open SEC play at LSU. The Razorbacks were 9-1 at the time, off to the program’s best start since 2012. It was a team with two undersized outsides, 5-foot-10 Taylor Head and 5-7 (really) Jill Gillen who were crushing it, along with a 5-8 setter in Hannah Hogue and a 5-8 libero in Courtney Jackson.
We visited the night before the LSU match, Head, Gillen and me, and had a wonderful interview. Then I took this picture:
Taylor Head, left, and Jillian Gillen at LSU in September 2022
I wasn’t sure when I would get around to writing the story, but …
Arkansas lost in five the next night at LSU. That meant the story had to hold.
Four days later, the Razorbacks won at Ole Miss, but there was no time on my schedule to write. The story could wait.
But then they got swept at Mississippi State before winning in five the next day. More self-induced non-writing excuses followed before Arkansas lost back-to-back matches to Kentucky. OK, Arkansas had Tennesse at home and if it could pull off a couple of victories, it was time to write.
Arkansas swept Tennessee two days in a row. But Gillen got hurt. The story was haunted and, well, it simply never saw the light of day.
Which brings us to a 2023 season in which Arkansas is 14-2 — the only losses were on back-to-back nights in late August to top-ranked Wisconsin — and 4-0 in the SEC. Only Tennessee (14-1, 5-0) has a better record in a league that got seven teams into last year’s NCAA Tournament.
Arkansas is in the midst of playing just one match in nine days. The Razorbacks go to Missouri on Sunday before playing host to Ole Miss on Friday.
“We’ve gotten better and better each year and this year has been a dream,” Gillen said after Arkansas swept at LSU this past Wednesday night. “But we don’t want to jinx anything, so we’re just going to stay in the present.”
Her team hit .343 and came away with a 25-20, 25-19, 25-20 victory.
“Your first road trip in conference and you never know how it’s going to go,” eighth-year Arkanas coach Jason Watson said. “We played well and responded well.”
Jillian Gillen puts all of her 5-foot-7 self into every swing/Arkansas Athletics
Gillen, the fifth-year outside from Stillwell, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, had 15 kills with two errors in 31 attacks to hit .419. She had an ace, six digs and two blocks, one solo. For that matter — and remember, she’s 5-7 — she has 24 blocks, six solo.
Also against LSU, Head had 14 kills, 14 digs and a solo block.
Gillen leads Arkansas with 240 kills, an SEC-best 4.21/set, and is hitting .293. with 163 digs.
Taylor Head/Arkansas Athletics
Head, a senior from Winter Garden, Florida, has 227 kills (3.98/set), 28 blocks and 172 digs.
In the real world, those are tall women.
“We’re tiny,” Head said last year. “But we go the job done.”
“They love playing volleyball,” Watson said. “That’s the thing. They jump well enough and they play well enough.”
Watson laughed.
“We get a ton of emails from 5-7 outsides, of course, but not all of them jump, not all of them can do the things that these kids are doing.
“We pay a tax on it some nights and it’s hard for us to play back-to-back (which they don’t in the SEC and won’t in the NCAA Tournament), but we’re doing it.”
Gillen hit .172 as a freshman when she averaged 3.75 kills/set. As a sophomore in the COVID season, she averaged 3.9 kills and hit .189. In the fall of 2021, she averaged 4.12 kills and hit .206. And last year, missing a handful of matches and playing hurt the last half of the season, she averaged 3.6 kills and hit .224, a percentage that went down when she played injured later in the season.
“This is my last year, my last year to compete with these people and I love these people,” Gillen said. “And I’ll do anything to help us succeed. I think having that mindset has helped me to play a little bit more clean and make smarter choices.”
That’s not lost on her coach.
“She was playing maybe not this well, but she was playing really well before she had that injury against Tennessee last year,” Watson said. “So I think there’s some urgency there. Life is chapters and she wants to write a pretty nice chapter here.”
Maggie Cartwright, a 5-11 grad student from Kimberly, Wisconsin, has 152 kills (2.67/set), 115 digs and 40 blocks.
Sania Pettis, a 6-1 junior middle from Houston, has 121 kills and 47 blocks.
The tallest player on the team, Zoi Evans, a 6-4 junior middle from Tampa, has 34 kills and 56 blocks.
“I may be the tallest, but the people around me make me feel small because they’re mighty,” Evans said. “I have some small, mighty people around me.”
Libero Courtney Jackson has 223 digs, 3.91/set and is averaging more than an assist per set.
Hannah Hogue/Arkansas Athletics
Hogue, the junior from Fort Smith, Arkansas, about an hour south of Fayetteville, is averaging 11.25 assists per set, is tied with Gillen with 28 aces (Head has 26) and averages 2.31 digs and has 21 blocks.
“I have reallly good hitters,” Hogue said. “They make a setter’s job a lot easier. I just throw up a good ball and they do the rest.”
“She makes everyone in our gym better,” Gillen said.
“We say this and we laugh about it, but she’s from Fort Smith, Arkansas, and that’s a rough town,” Watson said. “You’ve got to be tough there and you’ve gotta get after it. She’s a tough kid. She’s put in her time to create a relationship with kids and that’s not always easy and she’s holding her own in the front row. She’s pretty calm and we’ve got some kids who can ride the roller coaster, but she’s steady.”
Hogue: “This is a dream come true. It’s exceeding my expectations and it continues to. It’s just a blessing and I’m thankful for it every day.”
The main cog is Gillen, who simply defies a lot of volleyball logic.
Gillen was, of course, recruited primarily as a libero. To those schools, she never responded. Watson “was the first SEC coach who said I would play and I would get to hit at the high level I was striving to be at.”
Gillen is a superior jumper — she touches over 10 feet — can flat-out crush a ball, is a fearless defender, and is, simply, a baller. For that matter, she played basketball in middle school and, not surprisingly, “I fouled out a lot.”
“She’s still the same kid as when we recruited her,” Watson said. “She has this enormous chip on her shoulder, still. She has a chip and do not ignite that chip. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to do that.”
Gillen, who comes from an athletic family and whose mother, the former Kady Berger, played at Morehead State (1984-86), got a laugh out of the story about this story, about how this never got written a year ago. We talked about the turn of events and she said she tore her posterior cruciate ligament and was out for four matches.
“It was up to me and I wanted to come back and I pushed it, just being me, and I think finishing that season and not being a hundred percent really got to me. I went through a lot of self doubt and a lot of reflection.
“And also a lot of gratitude, I think, to be where I am now and that I get to play healthy every single day. I’m grateful for that.”
Jillian Gillen of Arkansas attacks against Wisconsin/Arkansas Athletics
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