2024 Volleyball Season is Nigh

 The UT Arlington Athletic Department kicks off the 2024/25 athletic season later this week as the Volleyball team travels to their first match of the season. As is customary, the Western Athletic Conference released its preseason poll and as I alluded to a couple of blog entries ago, the Mavs have garnered respect in the conference.

To refresh, in the UTA hosting championship post, I mentioned the volleyball team is returning a lot of talent. In conjunction, the WAC lost two of its top four programs in Stephen F. Austin and UT Rio Grande Valley. Looking at who is returning, last year's results and recent historical performance, this year's preseason volleyball poll was about as easy as it gets, even in the transfer portal era. 

As we head into the season, here's what the prognosticator's think the final standings will look like, with first place votes in parenthesis:

2024 Schedule Detective

 We are on the eve of the upcoming athletic season, which means the summer dropoff in athletic competition is nearing its end. To fill the void until late, late August, let's dip into this year's edition of schedule detective.

For the new-comers, much of my information comes from Rocco Miller on X. He's a great follow for college basketball. While not all the information comes from him, he gets a lot of scoops and information in regards to the non-conference scheduling contract. Instead of having to look through his thousands of tweets, I'll compile it here, though some games do come from other sources.

Going in this season, we knew there'd be a return game from last season in Oral Roberts. There's a high chance, but not a guaranteed one, in North Texas and Texas State reappearing on the schedule. There's usually a guarantee game, or usually many, as a (usual) Power 5 school pays a non-P5 school for a one-off game, a non-DI, or many, and a multi-team event, or MTE, on the final schedule release. Additionally, the Western Athletic Conference has released the conference schedule, so more than three quarters of this coming season is known. 

Here's what I can report so far:

UTA Hosting some Championships

This week, the Western Athletic Conference announced the championship sites for the upcoming athletic year. While many are still the same, basketball will be in Vegas, baseball in Arizona, for example, there's a good slate of new sites throughout the year.

For the first time since the UT Arlington Athletic Department rejoined the WAC, Arlington (which has been the home city for the conference for over a year) will host multiple sports postseason dreams.

The last two years, the tennis tournament champions were crowned in Arlington. UTA's men's tennis team has taken advantage of the home-town hosting and made their way to the NCAA's. But tennis has been it. Until this upcoming year.

Here's the list of the of champion sites:

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.