Texas State’s women’s volleyball team have cancelled a spring match against the University of Texas, who finished last season ranked #6 in the country after losing in the national quarterfinals. The teams were originally scheduled to play in a nationally-televised exhibition on Thursday on the Longhorn Network. The match was cancelled at Texas State’s request, according to a University of Texas spokesperson, and will not be rescheduled.
Both teams are still scheduled to play at the F.A.S.T. tournament in Houston this weekend.
The Longhorns won their first spring match of the season on April 4th with a 3-1 victory over long-time rivals Texas A&M.
Texas has just 10 players on their spring roster this season, with no freshmen coming in early and a number of high-profile losses from last season. They graduated 4 players out of 17, including record-setting libero Cat McCoy and All-American outside hitter Ebony Nwanebu. They also lost all-world freshman Lexi Sun on a transfer to Nebraska, and two liberos, Natalie Gilbert and Olivia Zelon, also no longer appear on the team’s roster.
Texas State, meanwhile, is coming off a banner 25-10 season of their own that saw them advance to, and eventually lose in, the Sun Belt Conference Championship game against Coastal Carolina. They wound up hosting the first two rounds of the National Invitational Volleyball Championship (the subordinate tournament to the NCAA Championship) and swept Rice 3-0 before losing to Texas Tech 0-3 in the 2nd round.
In Texas’ first spring match, junior Micaya White and senior Yazmin Bedart-Ghani got the lion’s share of the offense, with 22 and 31 attacks (and 10 and 9 kills) each. Rising sophomore Brionne Butler got her biggest run of the year – after not appearing in any matches in her freshman campaign for Texas, Butler had 5 kills on 7 swings to go with a team-high 4 block assists. The young middle blocker was a member of the 2015 and 2016 Junior USA National Team and was named the “Best Blocker” at the NORCECA U20 Championships in 2016.
Leave a Reply