Exhibition Matches Pt II
Texas concludes their spring exhibition schedule in Austin
We’ve reached late April and with it the end of spring camp for Texas volleyball. While it was a whirlwind for fans filled with lots of second-hand accounts of how the exhibition matches went thanks to the lack of television coverage, all eyes can finally start turning towards the regular season which looms a short four-ish months away. Excitement for fans will really come in two forms from now until August: the spring transfer portal window and scheduling announcements.
Spring Portal Window
While the spring transfer portal window has been closed on the football side of college athletics, it remains an option in volleyball. The portal will open next Friday, May 1st, and close again two weeks later on May 15th. For grad transfers, those dates are less relevant, and we’ve already begun to see those players announce their entry into the portal.
Fans will remember last season’s spring portal departure by middle blocker Marianna Singletary; Mari’s move from Austin to the Westwood, CA campus of the UCLA Bruins came as a surprise to many including both Brittany and I here at Point Texas, and that move has continued to pay unfortunate dividends downstream for the Longhorns. Jerritt was unable to find a replacement for Singletary in response, and Texas played the 2025 season with only three MBs on the roster, including highly-rated freshman Taylor Harvey who only joined the team a few weeks before the season.
Since 2025, Texas has continued to hemorrhage bodies in the middle, losing Ayden Ames to Creighton following the Longhorns’ elimination from the national tournament in December. With no middle blocker in the recruiting class and no success securing a replacement during the fall window, the staff elected to bring freshman Addy Gaido in from her pin-hitting role and cross-train her in the middle. I fully anticipate that an experienced MB will be at the top of Jerritt’s wishlist in the next few weeks. Any middle blocker that Texas adds stands a serious chance of seeing the floor this fall.
This isn’t a team that lacks for much outside of bodies in the MB room, so I don’t anticipate any additions during this portal window will be earth-shattering moves, though there’s no surer way to create that situation than for me to say it won’t happen. There are scenarios in my mind where I could see Texas making depth pickups for the pin hitters as well as at defensive specialist, though neither room is in quite as dire of need as we see at middle blocker.
Fall Schedule Filling Up
Texas has made a handful of schedule announcements since our last article here.
The Longhorns will face the SMU Mustangs on Wednesday, September 9th in Dallas as part of the Showdown at the Net series between the ACC and SEC. They’ll follow up later that week at the Moody Center in Austin on Sunday, September 13th, facing the Wisconsin Badgers as has been long-rumored. Finally, the Southeastern Conference released their schedule for the volleyball season, with Texas opening the conference calendar on Friday, September 25th in Knoxville against Tennessee and concluding in Savannah, GA once more with the SEC Tournament ending on November 24th. With these announcements, the calendar now stacks up like this:
The thinking person will be quick to note two glaring gaps in the schedule: the weekends of August 29th and September 19th.
Last week, Nebraska head coach Dana Busboom Kelly told a Lincoln, NE luncheon crowd that a match with Texas would be happening this season and it would not be in Lincoln. Rumors of this match’s existence have been commonplace since December, so it’s nice that someone wearing Husker red was nice enough to finally do something useful for the rest of us and confirm that it is a thing. DBK also noted that contracts were still being signed, so the exact time, date, and location remain unknown. Through the grapevine, we’re hearing that everyone should book hotels in Sin City for the last weekend in August with the match taking place either the 29th or 30th at T-Mobile Arena alongside the Strip. There is also chatter that Texas and Nebraska are trying to rope two more schools into joining and making it a larger preseason event with all teams getting to play two of the other attendees. But let’s be honest: we’re all just looking forward to Texas and Nebraska renewing the rivalry, and other matches would amount to little more than a sideshow attraction.
For the weekend between the match at Moody against Wisconsin and the start of the SEC slate, I would guess that Jerritt will likely turn to his reliable regional foes like Baylor, TCU, Rice, or Houston - or maybe the omnipresent Stanford - to fill the gap with at least a couple of games. That would give Texas 24 regular season matches, more than in-line with the 23 Texas played before the SEC tourney in 2025.
That leaves us a mere 17 weeks until first serve against Arizona State. Probably about time for us to get cracking on the season preview articles, eh? Finalize those last few dates, Jerritt, and we’ll get it started over here!
Beach Update
Following their sweeps against UTEP and Houston Christian during last weekend’s Lone Star Classic in Austin, Texas beach volleyball ranks #3 in the AVCA poll and entered this week’s MPSF Championship tournament with a 22-6 record.
Texas swept #11 Grand Canyon on Wednesday for their third win and second sweep of the year over GCU. They advanced to face #1 UCLA for the fourth time this season yesterday, having been swept twice by the Bruins before upsetting them in their last match-up in Austin on March 27th. Texas was able to upset #1 UCLA again by a 3-1 margin, advancing to play #5 USC in the semifinal this morning.
In the early slot, Texas fell behind initially, dropping the #2 and #4 matches to USC before storming back to win matches #1, #5, and #3 (in that order) with the final two coming down to the last set. With UCLA taking down Stanford in the other semifinal, it set up one more meeting between the Horns and the Bruins for the 2026 MPSF Championship.
In the championship final, Texas again dropped the #2 and #4 pairs to UCLA, but the remaining pairs all went to war today. #1 pair Brecht Piersma and Katie Hashman scratched out the three set win, and #5 pair Macey Butler and Karin Zolnercikova recovered after dropping the first set to also win their match in three. Texas' #3 pair, consisting of Emma Grace Robertson and Lily Davis, took their first set and were down massively in the second set but fought off numerous set points en route to a furious 26-24 comeback win!
Texas is your 2026 MPSF conference champion in their first season in the league!
The Sandhorns and Coach Stein Metzger now look ahead to the national tournament which kicks off next Friday, May 1st in Gulf Shores, AL with sights firmly set on bringing home the school’s first beach volleyball national championship. I bet that trophy would look extra shiny sitting in the Texas Athletics Hall of Fame when it returns to Austin…
LOVB Austin
This isn’t really my lane, but hell, I’ll give them a shout anyway. Congratulations to LOVB Austin for repeating as champions of League One Volleyball and remaining the ONLY champion in the fledgling league’s two-year history. Madi Skinner was once again named the LOVB Championship MVP, recording 39 kills in the two-match championship series and decisive “Golden Set” alongside four blocks. Madi was joined by fellow Texas alumni Khat Bell, Molly McCage, Asjia O’Neal, Zoe Jarvis (née Fleck), Bella Bergmark, Juliann Faucette, and Logan Eggleston in claiming a fourth volleyball championship in five years in the 512.
Game Impact Score (GIS) Development
I’m planning for my next article to be a deep dive into the GIS tool with screenshots galore of what kind of information we’re going to have at our disposal, but I wanted to also provide an update on how the development of it is going.
It has been a bit of a headache the last two weeks chasing down bugs and ironing out hiccups. Our initial dataset dates back to 2022 (there’s more data out there for earlier years, but it is inconsistently formatted and very messy), giving us four years of information to consider and make sure is good quality.
One of my goals with GIS+ (in addition to the opponent-strength correction) was to make it capable of reflecting “clutch” plays by weighting them more heavily than the others. Intuitively, we would all say that a kill to setup match point in the fifth set is more impactful than a kill to make it 19-11 in the second, right? The fifth set kill is much more “clutch”. That requires us to look beyond simply “how many kills did AVW have” and instead lean on play-by-play logs to determine when her kills happened.
Further, we are able to dig beyond the simple box score numbers; items like hitting percentage are shared with regularity, but that’s hardly the only measure of efficiency available in volleyball. You can also inspect things like setting efficiency (something I defined as the percentage of a player’s sets which are converted directly into kills/assists), side-out percentage, and others to determine a player’s overall contribution to a match. In theory, a setter who has 35 assists on 82 set attempts was less effective than one who had 35 assists on only 64 set attempts, so we should give the more efficient setter a higher score.
Both of those considerations are huge in order to ensure that GIS+ is a reliable metric.
On the positional side of things (pGIS, as I introduced a couple weeks ago), I was able to firmly establish what constitutes a “baseline” performance at each position statistically, allowing me to provide a reliable and clear number on the 0-10 scale established with which a player’s performance in a game can be fairly judged.
Ahead of the next article where we will dive in deeper, I am pursuing a few more bugs such as why some older games are failing to accurately show a player’s position - thus breaking pGIS - as well as building out additional features. Alongside game-by-game scores, there will be ways for Brittany and I to view how a player has scored across their career, who the top players are in individual seasons, and who the top teams overall are. My immediate goal is to have this available for us to discuss transfers that Texas picks up, citing what their pGIS score is and comparing that to recent Longhorns at their position.
Again, I’m excited to share more as I continue building this out! Hook ‘em!