Setting the Bar: A look inside the 2009 volleyball season (Part 1)
12/16/2009 12:00:00 AM | Volleyball, Features
By Matt Fancett, U-M Athletic Media Relations
It was a damp, chilly night in Palo Alto, Calif., as the final points of the 2009 season were registered against Michigan inside Maples Pavilion. The weather outside drew an eerie parallel to the temperament inside the Wolverines locker room following a 3-0 loss to No. 3 Hawai'i in the NCAA Stanford Regional final. As raindrops fell outside, tears fell inside, as head coach Mark Rosen addressed his troops.
"There are never the right words for me to say in this situation," Rosen said to the sullen faces of a Michigan team who had come one win away from achieving its preseason goal of the program's first trip to the Final Four. "We came up short tonight. I am so extremely proud of you for what you have accomplished this season. Don't let tonight's outcome cloud the fact that you have raised the bar for Michigan volleyball for years to come."
Those words hung in the air like the San Francisco fog building outside as this team, especially the senior class, looked to its coach one last time.
"You seniors," Rosen continued, pausing to search for just the right words to use. "You four laid out a goal for this team and were relentless in your quest for it. You are four very special people; I want to thank you for what you have meant to us. For what you have given to this team and to this university. I don't know that I can sum up what an impact you have made."
Rosen may be right, maybe you cannot sum up the impact this team and especially this senior class has had on Michigan volleyball, then again, maybe you can.
BANKING ON A GOAL IN BRAZIL
Michigan began preparations for the 2009 season with a May trip to Brazil. Competing against and defeating some of the top teams the volleyball-crazed country had to offer, however, is not what Rosen remembers most from the trip.
After winning its first five matches, the Wolverines took a two-day break in the beach town of Bouzios. It was the night after native Juliana Paz's birthday and the team celebrated with cake and conversation on the patio overlooking a starry sky and crashing waves.
"It was the night before we were going to go play the Brazilian Junior National team," Rosen explains. "We all sat around this lounge area at our hotel, and I simply asked the team what they wanted to get out of the coming season. The first thing that was fired back by the group was that they wanted to go to the Final Four."
A lofty goal for sure, even for a group coming off its second straight trip to the Sweet 16 and returning all but two starters from a team that set a Rosen-era record for wins, just five months earlier.
"I remember thinking to myself that was a pretty big goal to reach for," Rosen says with a smile. "Then, I took a step back and saw the intensity on the faces of the team. It wasn't a pipe-dream for them, it was something they had talked about before and they were basically cluing us in on their plan."
A CHANCE AT REDEMPTION
As the Wolverines gathered in August for pre-season practices, one game stood out to everyone who examined the schedule, an opening-night date with No. 3-ranked Nebraska. Michigan would open the new season against the very squad that ended the last one, just nine months earlier. Only this time, the Wolverines would not be on neutral soil. They would head squarely into the lion's den to face the Huskers in Omaha, Neb., on the biggest preseason stage in collegiate volleyball at the exclusive invite-only AVCA Showcase Tournament.
"It is a huge honor to be invited," said Rosen. "But when we saw we would play Nebraska to open the year, I think that helped amp up our preseason practices just a little bit."
The Wolverines rolled into Omaha amidst a sea of red and promptly shocked the volleyball nation, but not themselves, with a 3-0 victory. They come out of the gate running on all cylinders. The game plan to go right after Nebraska with a nothing-to-lose mentality was executed to perfection. They played stellar defense and hit with a precision that knocked the Huskers on their heels, both figuratively and literally. A defining early moment of the entire season came in the first hour of the first match when sophomore Alex Hunt unleashed the final point of set two, a rocketing line shot that caught Nebraska libero Kayla Banwarth square in the nose.That shot, heard round the volleyball world, signaled the Wolverines were for real.
"It is a huge win," senior captain Megan Bower said in a postgame interview."This is the biggest win in our history. I am so proud of the team and of what we accomplished. To come in here and win is a huge accomplishment, but we can't rest on it. This is a great jumping off point, but we have to build on it."
And build on it they did.
The Wolverines followed up the next night with a win over No. 22 Kansas State to win the Showcase. It was a win Bower described as critical.
"If we lose that next night, nobody remembers that we just beat Nebraska," she said. "All they would think was that it was a fluke."
The team didn't stop there. It reeled off 11 more victories and climbed from No. 16 in the weekly AVCA Coaches Top 25 Poll all the way to a program-high No. 6 ranking. They went on to win the first three tournaments of the season, ran their program record streak to 13 straight tournament titles and 52 straight regular-season non-conference wins. They took a 27-set winning streak into their final tuneup before Big Ten play, a contest with Oregon State at Crisler Arena, but watched all the streaks come to a halt at the hands of the Beavers with a 3-0 loss.
"We did not play Michigan volleyball that night," said junior setter Lexi Zimmerman in reflection of the loss. "We weren't doing the things we usually do well and it showed. That day we got a pretty big wake-up call; in hindsight maybe it was a good thing."
Maybe it was a good thing indeed.
Check back tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 17) for part two to see how the Wolverines handled play in the toughest volleyball conference in America and earned a trip to the big dance again.
