2024 Volleyball Schedule

No need to dance around this one with a fancy introduction. As the title indicates, the UT Arlington volleyball squad recently released their schedule for the upcoming season. Aside from a couple of spotlights here and there, nothing particularly stands out to me.

For the non-conference portion, I will highlight the four tournaments, the participants and their conference. I will also briefly look at the teams finish in the prior year.

The Mavericks open the season at the Sawyer Camillo Memorial Classic in Lafayette, Louisiana. There, they will play the Missouri Valley's Murray State Racers, the Southwestern Athletic Conference's Jackson State Tigers and twice former conference rival Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns from the Sun Belt Conference.

MSU was a game under .500 overall in 2023, 13-14, with a 7-11 MVC mark, placing 9th out of 12. JSU finished 17-13 and 10-6 in conference, good for 5th in the 12-team SWAC. Louisiana, arguably the best non-P5 team in the state, was 19-13, 9-7 SBC last year. The Sun Belt used divisional play to divide the 14 teams, but based on an unbalanced record, they'd have been 7th. 

Transfer Portal Activity

 In my last post, I did a first and solicited comments to initiate a post topic. In the early years, I wouldn't have, as this was an outlet for me and not a platform to garner attention. I have noticed an increased interaction in the comments section and decided to ask the community to break a topic block that uncharacteristically exists for me during the summer.

And Duck came to the plate first.

As I mentioned elsewhere, according to the UTA website, Coach Turner has signed eleven new players, two of whom appear to be freshmen. Those two plus the nine transfers include two centers, three forwards, four guards, and two unknowns. It appears there will not be room left on the court or the bench for many others, so I wonder who, if any of last year's players will be back. Does anybody know?

Wasn't expecting transfer portal activity to be the first topic, but it is certainly a welcomed one, though not for the "right" reasons.

Follower Feedback

 Happy Fourth of July to everyone!

What's painfully obvious is that today's holiday is in the middle of summer. We have the slowest part of the sports calendar during this month (coupled with the end of last month and the beginning of the next), but more so in college athletics. The only news happening right now is which schools left their old homes and joined a new conference.

That's where the summer chats series, formally named last year but has been my practice almost from the beginning of this blog, comes in. However, outside of schedule detective, which will make an appearance later this season, I'm at a loss for non-specific topics this year, having felt most of what is on my mind has thoroughly been discussed. I've posted about facilities, sports additions, top moments in UT Arlington history, conference realignment and football and more. I've been working on something but haven't made as much headway as I'd hoped. Outside of that, I have nothing new to add.

So this year, I'm gonna try something new.

SFA is Out

Stephen F. Austin State University announced a couple of weeks ago that they intended to depart the Western Athletic Conference and rejoin the Southland Conference, effective in one month. That ended weeks of speculation regarding their intentions to move.

SFA officials trumped up the move, of course. Citing benefits that were generally esoteric in nature, save for the student athletes (an increasingly archaic term) decreasing their time out of the classroom with reduced travel time, a cost savings and ability for fans to see the team on the road. 

For the WAC, it does several things and I'll give my take on both entities.

Diamond Addendum

The transition between the outline of the last post and the written word left off a very important point that applies to both the baseball and soft squads at UT Arlington. I initially thought I'd add the info into its own comment below the post, but there's a lot to it and its deserving of its own blog entry.

With the struggles the two teams have experienced the last few years, especially since they downgraded conferences from an RPI perspective, there has been a very notable metric that suffered this year, reversing a decade climb.

In 2024, the baseball team averaged 378 fans, the third straight decline in attendance, discounting the COVID year where every game drew 314 in the box score. It was the lowest since 2014's 352. Their time in the Sun Belt was generally positive for fans in the seats, nearly doubling the totals the team saw while in the Southland Conference. The highest year was 618 spectators per game in 2017. 2019 saw 591 and 2020 drew 606 fans before COVID cancelled the remainder of the schedule. 

Diamond Disappointments

 Between the conference tournament drop off in men's basketball and the situation surrounding the passing of my dad, I'm not going to post much regarding the spring sports this year. Congrats to the men's tennis team on the defense of their Western Athletic Conference title. They will be the only sport to bring a title and play in the postseason this year. The track teams performed well in their outdoor meets as well. Both golf teams were top of the bottom half with some marked performances that give cause for hope.

But the baseball and softball teams had less than stellar seasons in 2024. Despite the hype I heard regarding the baseball team heading into the year, they earned 22 wins versus 34 losses. I didn't hear much about the softball team in the preseason either way. They earned one more win than their baseball counterparts against the same amount of losses.

There's quite a bit to break down with the baseball results. First, UTA performed poorly in mid-week games. Once conference play started in the second weekend in March, they went 2-10 in non-conference play. Factoring out Houston, which was a weekend series due to the WAC having an odd number of teams, they were 1-8 in mid-week games during that stretch. I don't know what has happened to UTA baseball, but that's the second time in three years with that bad a non-conference stretch. Last year's wasn't much better either, just not this bad.

But the losses weren't blowouts. There were six total one-run losses, eight losses by two runs, two losses by three runs and six losses by four runs. That's 22 of 34 losses by a grand slam or less.

Don't let the Door Hit Ya

Big news broke out of the constant reshuffling of the conference realignment game this week. Just a couple weeks after my previous post about the problems Grand Canyon University brings to the Western Athletic Conference, they, along with Seattle University, accepted an invitations to the West Coast Conference, made notable by Gonzaga's domination the last couple of decades. There's a lot to unpack here and with everything else in conference realignment, the end result depends on other factors outside the WAC's and UT Arlington's control.

My first reaction was ecstatic, but it left me a little confused. I'm a firm believer that GCU is a cancer within the conference. As I detailed in the last post, their funding model cannot be replicated and they shovel a lot of money to athletics from online degrees. They outspend everyone overall but California Baptist in the WAC. Similar to an inflation adjuster, CBU spends more just by being in California and would spend dollar for dollar less than GCU were they in Arizona, or get more bang for their buck if spending was the same. However, in men's basketball, GCU almost doubles second-place CBU and is nearly 500 percent higher than last place MBB budget. 

Now I've taken flack on social media because I'm told the real reason I dislike GCU is because UTA just can't compete. The reality is that their funding mechanism creates a competitive unbalance where UTA's only shot is to win is via an upset (made even harder by the perceived officiating issues). I said it last post and I'll say it again, I don't believe GCU was the better team last year. When UTA couldn't get past Georgia State while in the Sun Belt Conference, I never despised the Panthers like I do GCU.

 But that's all the WCC's issue after next athletic year, even if I don't understand why they were selected over CBU.