Feeling Moody
Texas lines up for their next two opponents, including a first-time showdown in the Moody Center.
We finally got the regular season schedule for Texas’s Fall 2025 campaign, and it’s looking like an exciting slate. Complaints in recent years for the Texas men’s basketball team have been weak non-conference scheduling, but head coach Jerritt Elliott has never shied away from some big early meetings, as evidenced in Josh’s write up last week on the Creighton “revenge” match.
Perhaps more important than just the schedule and how that plays into postseason seeding is the continual building of the Texas brand in volleyball. Winning three titles in eleven years - including the back-to-back campaigns of 2022 and 2023 - should make for a national brand. In ways, it completely has. But there will always be those who push the envelope, and in 2023 Nebraska decided to park a temporary court in their football stadium and managed to impressively draw a record 92,003 fans into the stands for a competitive women’s volleyball match.
Props are due where they are due, and Nebraska earned the world record for largest attendance to a women’s sporting event. It’s not hard to imagine why so many fans would pack out a stadium that hasn’t seen a successful football team for some decades…especially in the cornfields of Nebraska. It was still a fun experience that announced nationally the rise in women’s sports, with the feats of figures like Caitlin Clark and others becoming mainstays in the ESPN ticker.
There’s a few reasons why Texas probably won’t ever host a volleyball match in DKR; our football team actually has a pulse and Texas is too damn hot in the fall. I personally appreciate the packed-in, intimate, and loud environment of Gregory to watch the ladies play, although it’ll never break any attendance records. But Texas does have some options for creating a unique experience for a volleyball match in a different facility, and athletic director Chris Del Conte is continuing to tweak the gameday experience across all of the programs.
On September 7th, Texas will host its first home match of the year not at Gregory but in the Moody Center hoping to pack out the 10,000 seat arena and show the volleyball world that Texas also can draw big crowds for the ladies on the court. While Moody has hosted concerts, men’s hoops, and graduation ceremonies, this will mark its volleyball debut - a symbolic step forward for the program’s visibility.
That match will be against Stanford, which I’ll preview below. But before we discuss what to expect from that first ever matchup in Moody, we can’t overlook a little trip that Texas needs to take down to Houston to face off against Rice.
Rice Owls
Match Date: September 3, 2025
Match Location: Tudor Fieldhouse - Houston, TX
2024 Record: 19-8 (13-3, American)
NCAA Tournament: N/A
Postseason Rank: N/A
Result v Texas: L, 0-3 (16-25, 21-25, 15-25) [2023]
Texas last played Rice in a home match in September of 2023, and that national champion squad pretty handily took down the Owls. That Rice team finished their season 18-11, so last year’s mark of 19-8 showed some decent improvement for the squad from Houston.
Memories of a wily and surprisingly tough Rice team from a spring 2021 match may cause some Texas fans to still wake up in a cold sweat occasionally. But much like the virus that required plexiglass walls to surround the court in Gregory that season, that Owls squad has seemingly been long since forgotten. That victory marked a second straight for Rice over Texas, having also emerged as winners in a home matchup in 2019. Rice would not enjoy the same type of success as they did in that two year span again. There was no “new normal” that would see Rice as a perennial contender, and Texas has since enjoyed three straight victories.
Rice’s roster includes some promising players that the Longhorns will have to counter. Unanimous all-freshman team and second team all-conference pick Savannah Skopal proved to be an exciting setter for the Owls, playing in all 99 sets for the squad in her debut season. She not only finds ways to help her team score - she had three separate matches with over 50 assists last season - but she is effective on defense as well. In their matchup against Houston Christian, she notched 16 digs.
Outside Hitter (OH) Samarah Hill just departed the team, marking a significant loss on Rice’s roster after six seasons of play. She had earned first team all-conference in the American in her final campaign. Senior Taylor Preston transferred in from Michigan State this offseason and most likely is the best bet for slotting into that starting OH position. She averaged 2.85 kills and 3.24 points per set with a hitting percentage of .222 in 2024.
Middle Blocker Lademi Ogunlana was another first team all-conference player in 2024, and is looking to cap her time with the Owls with a strong senior season. The Missouri City, Texas native had a breakout junior campaign with 199 kills and a .395 hitting percentage.
Texas should be favored in this match, and this should prove to be a good opportunity to work on any obvious needs that Elliott sees after the early gauntlet up at the Opening Spike Classic in Madison that Josh wrote about last week. Texas will need the opportunity to reset, as it’ll only be four days after the Rice match until the Cardinal come to Moody to give the Longhorns another early season out-of-conference challenge.
Stanford Cardinal
Match Date: September 7, 2025
Match Location: The Moody Center - Austin, TX
2024 Record: 28-5 (17-3, Atlantic Coast)
NCAA Tournament: #2 Seed, Lost to #1 Louisville in Final Four
Postseason Rank: #5
Result v Texas: W, 3-0 (25-16, 25-21, 25-22)
Last season, Texas took an early-season trip to the Bay Area and faced an undefeated #2 Stanford team in front of their 6000+ fans in Maples Pavilion. At the time, Stanford had cruised to a 6-0 record while Texas was in a notable early slump, sitting at an uncomfortable 3-2.
We’ve written fairly extensively on Texas’s struggles last season - primarily centered around the Longhorns trying to forge a new identity in an Asija O’Neal-less roster and the 6-2 - and those struggles showed up mightily in that 2024 match at Stanford. The Longhorns’ hitting percentage was abysmal, sitting at just .171 in the first set compared to Stanford’s .433 allowing the Cardinal to quickly close on an early one set lead. The hitting percentages never really improved over the next two sets for Texas despite good individual performances from the likes of Madisen Skinner, Emma Halter, and Ella Swindle. Texas would eventually blow a 7-5 lead in the third set by allowing a 9-1 run for Stanford; a meltdown that would become all too familiar over the course of the season.
This Longhorn squad will have its own identity to figure out early this season, but there is room to hope that the first match ever at Moody will see a joyous crowd of 10,000 holding the horns high as they happily belt out The Eyes of Texas in celebration.
Texas and Stanford have faced off six times over the past six seasons and have split the matches evenly. The Longhorns are no strangers to facing this team early in the season while still shaking out the roster, and while there have been plenty of moving pieces this offseason for Texas the team looks well matched up against Stanford’s own roster.
Stanford is facing some noticeable losses of their own. Last year was the senior year for setter Kami Miner who was named the 2024 ACC Volleyball Setter of the Year through her 1255 assists over the season. Middle blocker Sami Francis played in 112 sets for the Cardinal and was responsible for 275 of the team’s kills but also just finished her senior year. Outside Hitter Elia Rubin is expected back for her own senior season this year - providing some much need veteran leadership for the Cardinal - but much of the Stanford roster were freshmen and sophomores last year.
The 2025 squad by all accounts should be Emma Halter’s team to lead from the back line as a senior. Ella Swindle is now entering her third season providing for great veteran experience at the setter position. Devin Kahahawei is entering her senior season as well. Ayden Ames has a valuable year under her belt. Overall, I like the experience on this Texas squad over the youth of Stanford. The Cardinal hauled in six standout signees from the high school ranks last season but it will take time for that recruiting effort to mature into matches won.
Stanford’s roster isn’t finalized yet; they may uncover a transfer gem to bring some veteran presence to the lineup. But Elliott has had his hands in the portal and managed to sign big takes himself. If he can get this roster synched up early in the season there’s a lot of potential for an early run through this tough non-conference schedule.
This all isn’t to say that Texas should have an easy time with Stanford come September 7th; in fact, Longhorns fans should expect the opposite. Stanford is a proud and storied program with a damn good coaching staff that recruits very well on both the West Coast and nationally. But Elliot does too, and in front of ten thousand fans in the lights of Moody, I’ll take the odds on the team in burnt orange.