The 2026 Texas volleyball season is officially (unofficially) underway! The Longhorns play the Minnesota Golden Gophers – a team we expect to make the NCAA tournament this fall as a numbered seed – at 1 PM. If I lived in Austin, you can believe I’d be playing hooky today to take in the sights and sounds of a live match at Gregory Gym for the low, low price of FREE. The match will unfortunately not be streamed or televised in any capacity, so unless Brittany manages to sneak in, we’ll be living off of second-hand reports to discuss the outcome.
On the preview side of things, we’ve reached our penultimate entry into the series, and it’s a throwback to the glory days (?) of the Big 12 as we take a closer look at Texas A&M (still unfortunately the defending national champions…) and Missouri. While neither of those teams were particularly big threats to Texas during the conference’s heyday, they do present at least the slightest hint of historical bad blood (and then some, in A&M’s case) to give the matches some flavor.
Let’s talk Aggies and Tigers today! Perhaps a bite-sized article regarding the fallout of the Minnesota exhibition tomorrow? Who knows? The world is our oyster.
Texas A&M Aggies
Match Date: November 1, 2026
Match Location: Gregory Gymnasium - Austin, TX
2025 Record: 29-4 (14-1, SEC)
NCAA Tournament: Won National Championship
Postseason Rank: #1
Result v Texas: Regular Season W, 3-2 (25-19, 25-23, 17-25, 19-25, 15-13) | SEC Tournament L, 1-3 (18-25, 25-16, 25-27, 19-25)
So. The worst came to pass last year. Texas A&M won a national championship in an actual sport for the first time since 2011 in women’s basketball. Worse yet, they finally did it at all in a sport that Texas is considered to be a blueblood in. Needless to say, it’s not a vibe I feel like experiencing again this year. Last year’s A&M team was steeped in senior leadership with experienced and talented playmakers all over the floor. While some of the talent stayed in College Station, a significant chunk of it exhausted their eligibility and moved onto the litany of professional volleyball opportunities that now exist, both domestically and abroad. Can A&M defend their title? It’d be an all-time coaching job by head coach Jamie Morrison if they did.
Key Losses
S Maddie Waak (pGIS 7.7, #4 at her position nationally)
MB Ifenna Cos-Okpalla (pGIS 7.6, #5)
OPP Logan Lednicky (pGIS 6.8, #37)
MB Morgan Perkins (pGIS 5.1, #40)
L Ava Underwood (pGIS 4.8, #21)
OH Emily Hellmuth (pGIS 3.6, #107)
Key Returners
OH Kyndal Stowers (pGIS 7.3, #26)
Key Additions
MB Kaia Castle (pGIS 4.3, #63) from Ohio State
OH Natalie Ring (pGIS 7.6, #18) from Marquette
MB Eliza Sharp (pGIS 5.4, N/A) from Boise State
The key losses section tells the whole story for Aggie volleyball as they head into the fall. So many of the names that defined their run in the national tournament are gone. Maddie Waak and Logan Lednicky are playing domestically for LOVB Houston. Cos-Okpalla is in Salt Lake with LOVB too. Morgan Perkins played in San Diego as part of MLV this spring before moving to start up the newest LOVB team in Minnesota. Emily Hellmuth transferred east to LSU to play beach volleyball. It’s a laundry list of talented names that will need to be replaced in College Station.
Kyndal Stowers remains and will inevitably be the driving force behind the A&M offense after going super saiyan in November and December, posting pGIS scores of at least 8.0 in eight of the Aggies’ final 13 matches with only one match being scored below a 7.3. She scored a 3.4 in A&M’s opening round sweep of Campbell in the NCAA tournament, an opponent that clearly did not demand that the Aggies put their back into it. How the team forms around her will determine how good Texas A&M is in 2026.
Jamie Morrison and his staff were busy in the portal looking to replace all those lost pieces. The middle blocker room has been reinforced by two experienced upperclassmen. Natalie Ring should prove to be a far bigger threat as the second OH behind Stowers than Emily Hellmuth did. Setter Lily Nicholson also joins the team from Florida State looking to reclaim her form from 2024 – when she posted a 5.9 pGIS at TCU – as opposed to the 0.9 she recorded with the ‘Noles in 2025. She’ll compete with senior Margot Manning (no relation to Arch) to quarterback the team. The freshman class will also see work early and often this season: Jenna Thedford and Gabi Rodriguez will be competing for playing time in the back row while sophomore Addi Applegate ascends to the libero jersey, and Brooke Lacewell is the lone pure opposite listed on A&M’s roster.
While I don’t anticipate A&M has the horses to defend their national title in 2026, Jamie Morrison has clearly built something of a machine in College Station entering his fourth year at the program. The floor for A&M this year is still safely in the top five in the SEC and playing in December, an impressive feat given that the financial faucet has only now been opened for Aggie Volleyball. Playing this one in Austin this year instead of in Aggieland will inevitably help the Horns in this one as the Lone Star Showdown transitions into a period where both teams will be consistently elite moving forward.
Missouri Tigers
Match Date: November 6, 2026
Match Location: Hearnes Center - Columbia, MO
2025 Record: 17-11 (8-7, SEC)
NCAA Tournament: Failed to qualify
Postseason Rank: Unranked
Result v Texas: L, 0-3 (19-25, 24-26, 25-27)
Maybe it seemed more likely to those in the know, but Missouri’s step back last season took me by surprise. I wrote in our previews last season that Missouri would be another strong opponent for Texas, and the Tigers ended up falling well short of that mark, missing the NCAA tournament for the first time in head coach Dawn Sullivan’s tenure. This was especially surprising when you recall that Mizzou found its way into the Sweet 16 in 2024 and brought back a who’s who of upperclassmen in 2025. How will the Tigers bounce back this year?
Note: Mizzou only faced eight Top 50 RPI teams last fall and thus have no players qualified for our end-of-season positional rankings.
Key Losses
MB Tyrah Ariail (pGIS 7.7)
L Maya Sands (pGIS 6.5)
OH Caylen Alexander (pGIS 6.2)
S Marina Crownover (pGIS 5.5)
MB Regan Haith (pGIS 4.4)
OH Janet Demarrais (pGIS 4.1)
Key Returners
L Zoey Matias-Lopez (pGIS 2.8)
OH Paige Felder (pGIS 2.1)
Key Additions
MB Lauren Larkin (pGIS 4.4) from Utah State
Those key losses represent all but the entire regular starting line-up for the Tigers last fall. While most of these pieces graduated, Marina Crownover made the move to Eugene, OR to play for the University of Nike at Oregon. You – and likely Dawn Sullivan too – would have expected a lot more wins than Missouri was able to rack up with that many seniors on the lineup card. While all teams these days suffer from significant attrition year-to-year, Mizzou especially has their work cut out for them.
On the returning side of things, Zoey Matias-Lopez presents a strong option for the black and gold defensively. Despite playing behind All-SEC Second Team libero Maya Sands, Matias-Lopez put up a very respectable level of production as the primary defensive specialist, something we don’t see very often when viewing rosters through the pGIS lens. Paige Felder is the only regular member of the Tiger battery to return for 2026 following a year where she was the clear #3 pin on the roster.
Lauren Larkin was a reasonably productive member of a solid Utah State team last fall, and her move to Columbia for this season provides her with an opportunity for a lot of growth and a path to playing time in the SEC. Dawn Sullivan also brings in an enormous recruiting class that will also get plenty of opportunities to play early. Three pin hitters, two middle blockers, and a setter made up the six-player class for Missouri. As is often the story, the speed at which they are able to integrate into the lineup will dictate if the Tigers are able to find their way back into the NCAA tournament in December.
I anticipate another painful year in Missouri as the Tigers attempt to rebuild their roster. The sizeable freshman class will likely pay dividends down the line, but I don’t think that things will be an immediate turnaround. To steal Harvey Dent’s line from The Dark Knight: “The night is always darkest just before the dawn.” It remains to be seen how long it will take for Dawn (Sullivan) to get her program out of the dark. Overall, Mizzou isn’t a program to take completely lightly; they’ll still take matches off of teams who don’t respect them. As the season winds down and focus begins to shift onto the SEC and NCAA tournaments, this is an obvious spot for Jerritt and his staff to do their signature late-season experimentation with the lineup. If this match took place early in the year, I would expect a lazy sweep for Texas. I won’t be shocked if a spot start for some of the depth pieces leads to this being a bit closer on the box score.
There remains only one more preview article before the start of the season. We’ll take a closer look at Vanderbilt, Ole Miss, and LSU in our final entry. The end is nigh!
In addition to that final preview post, I also plan to include three other articles: one for both of the exhibition matches with as much info as one can glean and subsequently consolidate from social media, forums, and the like, and one season prediction article akin to our “Call Your Shot” post we made last fall.
Hook ‘em Horns!