Return of the Mack
Maybe we should call ourselves the Febreze Brothers 'cause it's feeling so fresh right now
Alright. Let’s do this one last time. My name is Peter Parker. I was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for 10 years, I’ve been the one and o - whoops. Wrong script. But hopefully this is the last “first” post I have to make.
Last year’s attempt at writing about the Texas volleyball team lasted an astounding - checks notes - four articles. What say we wipe clean the slate and begin anew? Disregard that I’m calling this article “Return of the Mack”. Pretend that “Fresh Start of the Mack” has just as catchy of a hook.
For those of you reading this who aren’t related to me (hi, Mom!), weren’t referred to this by someone who is related to me (hi, Mom’s friends!), or aren’t just one of my friends taking pity on me for trying to convince people to pay attention to college volleyball: Welcome to the show! My name is Josh, if you did not feel so inclined as to internalize the name of the author at the top of the article when you started reading.
A lot of this little reintroduction article is going to be new, even for those of you who did read my four entries last spring. Even calling it a “reintroduction article” is disingenuous. Frankly, I kinda just jumped into the pool headfirst last time around the sun, and I didn’t take the time to explain why I of all people have enough of an ego to believe that I am capable of driving significant interest in the volleyball program at the University of Texas. So without further ado…
I really shouldn’t have this kind of ego. I’ve been playing volleyball my entire life about as long as this Substack has existed. I dabble in rec league volleyball on a perennial doormat of a team. What we lack in pure technical and athletic prowess, we make up for in spades of passive aggressive insults and jokes directed at one another. For some reason, that has all resulted in me being team captain. Go figure.
I did attend the University of Texas, however! So the connection to the school can’t be questioned by any ne'er-do-wells or Aggies who for some reason are on a Texas volleyball blog (???). That being said, I very much did not graduate from UT. I made it three semesters before the homesickness overcame me, and I transferred back closer to home, ultimately graduating from Colorado State University. With so little overlap between the two athletic departments - save for one March Madness meeting and last football season’s opener at DKR - there has been extremely limited conflict with me claiming both schools during whichever college sports season we were in the midst of, be that football, basketball, baseball, or volleyball.
To complicate matters, I was only ever good at really attending football games despite the fact that both of my schools had strong volleyball teams while I attended them. Colorado State never lost the Mountain West Conference championship in the years I was in Fort Collins, and they even managed to make a Sweet Sixteen run while I was on campus. In my time as a student at UT and CSU, I attended a whopping zero (0) combined volleyball matches.
My relationship with college volleyball started off in a way that is probably familiar to a lot of men my age: I watched every match I could once the NCAA tournament started, developed an alarming para-social relationship with whichever player I fell in love with during the broadcasts, and then forgot about the sport until the following December. I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you it’s a cycle I’m particularly proud of, but it was the cycle all the same. Thankfully, most of this transpired in the days well before “sliding into DMs” was a thing, so I never was in any position to completely embarrass myself trying to shoot my shot with Molly McCage, for example.
In the time since I graduated college, my attachment to many of the non-football sports at Texas has grown tremendously. I do concede that this is impressively late in the game for that to occur, but here we are. Thanks to my affliction of being terminally online, I’m a regular who was elevated to a moderator position on /r/LonghornNation, the Texas athletics community on Reddit (also simultaneously voted best AND worst mod in the 2023 year-end polls). My involvement in that community only served to develop my existing sports obsession to have a distinctly burnt orange hue. My sports preferences outside of the college realm generally have a distinctly Colorado lean, all the way down to the disastrous existence that is being a Rockies fan.
Anywho, in concerted efforts to grow that community beyond being simply yet another fan board that didn’t have an interest beyond talking about the football team, we pushed to discuss the sports at Texas that didn’t necessarily grab the headlines. Even getting baseball discussion moving took some work. One of my personal goals was to make volleyball chatter a bigger presence in the community. Sure, I’d only really watched the sport in December during tourney time for the prior several years, but I knew the sport was fun to watch, and I also knew Texas was a powerful program nationally. More than enough motivation to justify it.
So following the 2019 NCAA tournament (where Texas was brutally eliminated before the Regional Final for the first time in nearly a decade-and-a-half, mind you), I decided I was going to try much harder to engage with the team during the regular season. COVID came and tried to destroy that dream right off the rip by screwing up the 2020 season with all manner of schedule disruptions. Not to say that it wasn’t the right thing to do in the interest of public health and all that, but still, it certainly made it harder to stay engaged with the team with the world being in a general state of disarray.
Since that season, I’ve been a regular watcher of Texas women’s volleyball. Logan Eggleston et al. were kind enough to not force me to wait long to be rewarded, delivering the 2022 national title to my eyeballs with an Akana ace against Louisville to complete the sweep. Asjia O’Neal and Madi Skinner brought us the back-to-back national title, of course, and now we’re locked in. Officially living and dying over every match.
Despite how I started last spring’s attempt at establishing this Substack, my goal is not for this to turn into a place that vomits up statistics or analyzes the minutiae of technique. Bluntly, I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of speaking to any of that with the slightest bit of intelligence. We’re targeting more of a vibes-based analysis of what’s going on with the program. Are we winning and beating teams that have numbers next to their names? Great. Let’s celebrate that. Are we stumbling against teams without numbers next to their names? That sucks, and I’ll say it sucks, but I certainly am not going to sit here and tell you that if Ayden Ames changes her footwork just so, she’ll be able to close the block just a little bit faster which will help the back row in such-and-such a way and… You get it. Vibes-based.
The loftier goal is to get some of my similarly-minded friends to join and contribute with thoughts of their own; perhaps they’ll cover the beach team, or Longhorns in the pros, or maybe one of them does know something about something and can speak on a more technical level for the real sickos. The target is simply more. The internet has plenty of places who will gladly charge you $9.95 to give you this level of insight on football, basketball, or baseball. I want to see the online discourse about Texas women’s volleyball grow, and it seems to be that there’s a lack of people who want to write about it out there now. Even more than that, I think doing this kind of thing will inspire me to learn more. And the nature of the internet is such that I’ll learn a lot faster by being wrong than I will by asking a genuine question, so I guess the approach will be to grip it and rip it.
So in all seriousness, let’s do this one last time. Hook ‘em!