Rivalry Week
Texas volleyball renews its rivalry with Arkansas and the Red River Shootout this October
We’re officially five weeks away from Texas volleyball’s opening weekend in Milwaukee and the effective start of the 2026-27 NCAA year. Football will kick off Week 1 only two weeks later, and we’ll be back into the swing of full-blown burnt orange everything until the end of baseball season in June (ideally in Omaha). That also means we’re winding down to the end of the road with the schedule previews, so there will be actual volleyball to discuss rather than (admittedly) filler content to pass the time during the offseason.
This week’s theme on Point Texas is “red teams bad”. It will take absolutely zero convincing for any of our subscribers here to be on board with that sentiment as we look at the Razorback and Sooner rosters in anticipation of Texas’ trips to Fayetteville and Norman in mid-October. The match against Oklahoma in particular comes with excellent timing – full credit to whoever cooked up this schedule at SEC HQ – as it will occur on Sunday, October 11th, one day after the main event football game between Texas and OU at the State Fair of Texas in Dallas.
Good news for fans of the land thieves who have for whatever reason used your limited dial-up internet access to view this article: your volleyball team will score just as many touchdowns that weekend as your football team.
Arkansas Razorbacks
Match Date: October 9, 2026
Match Location: Barnhill Arena - Fayetteville, AR
2025 Record: 5-22 (1-14, SEC)
NCAA Tournament: Failed to qualify
Postseason Rank: Unranked
Result v Texas: L, 0-3 (17-25, 14-25, 25-27)
2023 must have felt like a distant memory last season for Hogs fans. That season, Arky won 28 matches against only six losses and made a run all the way to the national quarterfinals before getting bounced by #1 overall seed Nebraska. In 2025, they couldn’t even piece together six wins. Quite the precipitous fall, though not wholly surprising. The Razorbacks lost a significant amount of experience from their already-middling 2024 roster and subsequently converted that into only one SEC win, a home match against Ole Miss that went all five sets. They never even managed to make it to a fifth set in any of their other conference matches.
Key Losses
MB Zoi Evans (pGIS 2.8)
L Avery Calame (pGIS 1.7)
Key Returners
OH Lakin Laurendine (pGIS 4.7)
OH Parker Duncan (pGIS 4.3)
S Kiki Remensperger (pGIS 3.9)
MB Journey Peppers (pGIS 3.2)
OPP Romani Thurman (pGIS 3.2)
Key Additions
OH Laci Bohannan (pGIS 6.3) from Central Arkansas
MB Layla Smith (pGIS 5.5) from Boise State
A young squad in 2025, the Hogs lose a significant chunk of what little upperclassman leadership existed on the roster. While the upperclassmen he lost were not exceedingly productive on a bad team, head coach Jason Watson will need to find ways to get some of the young players to be the vocal leaders of this team in a hurry if there’s any hope of rebounding well in 2026.
The good (?) news for Arkansas is they return a lot of starters from last year’s team. Nearly the full battery on offense is back including their top player according to pGIS, outside hitter Lakin Laurendine. Of those five key returners listed, all but one was an underclassman, so growth is a more than fair expectation from a team that universally showed up as below average on the year.
Arkansas did land two sizable transfers in outside hitter Laci Bohannan and middle blocker Layla Smith. By pGIS, both of these ladies outpaced their new teammates last season. Ordinarily, I’d include a caveat that this was against weaker opponents, but neither Arkansas nor these two faced more than six RPI Top 50 opponents. Both Bohannan’s and Smith’s pGIS averages in those games were still better than those of their new teammates. Plus this is a rivalry article; I’m in no mood to cut Arkansas any slack. They also provide experienced senior leadership to a team, again, that would otherwise severely lack it. At least one of the returning starters likely needs to make room for Bohannan in order for the Piggly Wigglies to find their way this fall.
Despite the trek to Fayettenam, this isn’t a match Texas should expect to be challenged in barring the entire team coming down with dysentery the night before. Anything less than a sweep should be considered a massive disappointment and loss of focus for the Horns this fall.
Oklahoma Sooners
Match Date: October 11, 2026
Match Location: McCasland Field House - Norman, OK
2025 Record: 16-11 (7-8, SEC)
NCAA Tournament: Failed to qualify
Postseason Rank: Unranked
Result v Texas: L, 1-3 (23-25, 19-25, 26-24, 14-25)
The Sooners’ 2025 season was markedly “meh”. They were a hair below .500 in SEC play, and they even managed to take eventual conference champ Kentucky five sets in Lexington before finally falling short of the upset. They did also manage to beat Missouri in Columbia, their only SEC win over a team that would ultimately finish ahead of them in the regular season standings. This situation isn’t wholly dissimilar to where Arkansas sat this time last year, though Oklahoma at least hasn’t had the dramatic fall-off that the Hogs have had since 2023: their 16 wins were actually the most the program had recorded in a single season since they won 19 in 2019. But where does that leave head coach Aaron Mansfield in his fourth year at the helm in the heart of Tornado Alley?
Key Losses
OH Alexis Shelton (pGIS 7.6)
MB KJ Burgess (pGIS 6.2)
OH Emoni Bush (pGIS 5.8)
L Dionii Fraga (pGIS 4.7)
Key Returners
S Avaya Maga (pGIS 2.4)
OH Alyssa Flack (pGIS 1.9)
Key Additions
OH Alaleh Tolliver (pGIS 5.6) from Butler
MB Elise Hani (pGIS 3.6) from Washington
L McKenna Brand (pGIS 3.5) from UConn
L Kinsley Singleton (pGIS 3.4) from Nevada
OH Mari King (pGIS 2.1, #149 at her position nationally*) from Marquette
The answer? Mostly with a locker room full of new faces. Shelton and Bush exhausted their eligibility after last fall, while Burgess and Fraga managed to escape via the transfer portal to BYU and Alabama, respectively (we covered Fraga’s transfer in our last article). Those four departures represent the four best players on last season’s team with a precipitous drop to #5.
Subsequently, the returning talent is limited too. Setter Avaya Maga (a Canadian, ironically enough) will still have the reins on the offense, something she should have a much easier time with after a bumpy freshman year saw her post a disappointing average pGIS rating despite playing in every set of every match last year. Alyssa Flack was decent for Oklahoma in limited action in 2025.
The Sooner staff was deep in the transfer portal in search of instant-impact players to reinforce the roster alongside their two-player high school recruiting class. Alaleh Tolliver from Butler and Mari King* from Marquette figure into the picture on the pins with Flack. Elise Hani’s transfer from Washington gives OU an immediate and experienced option in the middle to provide some leadership. McKenna Brand and Kinsley Singleton will battle to replace Dionii Fraga in the libero uniform and attempt to solidify the back row in Norman. In short, this program is in a full rip-and-replace, and it remains to be seen how well that’ll work out for them.
It’ll be a grand experiment south of OKC this year with the roster turnover since 2025. The ceiling is likely no higher than yet another middling year, and as is the case with all teams on the wrong side of the Red River in this rivalry, a single-digit win total is very much on the table should the transfers not gel straight out the gate. I’m not typically one to give OU, its staff, or its fans undue credit, and I won’t start now. Texas should roll through McCasland as if they’re another entry in the Twister film franchise.
*Note: Mari King is the only player in today’s article who qualified for being nationally ranked at her position by way of playing a sufficient number of RPI Top 50 opponents.
Next week, we head back home to the friendly confines of The Greg as Texas faces off with Auburn and Florida in our next entry in our 2026 opponent preview series. Hook ‘em!