2011 Montana volleyball preview: Grizzlies hoping to own the night
8/10/2011 12:00:00 AM | Volleyball
Aug. 10, 2011
Two hundred fifty-seven days ago, Montana volleyball coach Jerry Wagner had the perfect team. That lofty designation is important for two reasons.
First: In two decades of coaching at the Division I level, Wagner has been a part of only a handful of teams that have reached such a level that they bring tears to his eyes when he recalls their accomplishments.
The 2010 Montana volleyball team was one of those, maybe because the entire season was a soap opera in real time, a reality show brought to life.
There was the question of Amy Roberts' return from a knee injury that ended her 2009 season midway through. There was a new setter. There were freshmen at key positions. There was the glaring spotlight of being one of the Big Sky Conference favorites when the team hadn't finished better than third since ... 1994.
The team started the season 2-7 and went through a late-season swoon that had its tournament hopes on life support - and isn't someone lying in a hospital bed on life support standard for a soap opera?
But then everything finally came together.
Over a two-week stretch, Wagner had the first perfect team of his time at Montana. After months of being thisclose, everything finally clicked and came together.
Not perfect like national champions perfect, but perfect in a way that means something to Wagner.
After months of refinement by fire, the team came out polished in the end, a group playing better than the sum of its individual parts.
More than that, the sense of team that the players fostered is what chokes Wagner up 257 days later. Roles had been accepted, the goals became common, the eyes of all become one in their focus.
Two hundred fifty-seven days ago, there wasn't a better team in the Big Sky Conference.
The Grizzlies were coming off a sweep of Weber State and Idaho State on the Big Sky's final weekend of regular-season matches, and top-seed and host Portland State, which had beat Montana 13 straight times, was proving to be no match for the Grizzlies in the Big Sky tournament semifinals.
Griz, 25-18, 25-18. Montana hitting .235 to Portland State's .061. No. 4 seeds don't do that to No. 1 seeds, unless they find their purple patch.
For 40 minutes Montana played as well as the Grizzlies had all season. Probably since Wagner took over in 2006. Likely since the mid 90s.
The Vikings had the league MVP. Didn't matter. The Vikings were on their home court. Didn't matter.
The only thing that could slow Montana, it seemed, would be itself.
So what do you do when everything you've worked toward, everything you've sacrificed for, is finally coming together? What do you do when the only thing you want is to get together with your teammates and celebrate the bliss of it all?
Montana left the Stott Center floor after the second set of the best-of-five match for the 10-minute break, and the seemingly invulnerable heroes found their kryptonite: their own happiness.
What do you do when you are on your way to a Big Sky Conference championship? You party like it's a Katy Perry video (from the 3:29 mark to 4:12 only, unless you want to get really jiggy). Not even the coaches were immune, with Wagner playing the supporting role of Kenny G and his assistants Hanson to the raging party.
"I could sense what was going on, but I got caught up in it, too," Wagner admits nine months later.
"I don't want to say we lost our focus. I think the attention to detail was still there. But we played too much with the momentum of an event of that magnitude, and it got away from us."
An hour after heading to the locker room up 2-0, Montana returned to the locker room trying to come to grips with a 3-2 loss and the end of their season.
The Grizzlies fell behind 10-2 in the third set, then again in the fourth set and never held a lead in the fifth set. Season over.
Perfection can be such a fleeting thing. Here seemingly for good, then gone in the length of a 10-minute locker room break.
The second reason the 257-day designation is important is that Tuesday began a new season, and Wagner wants just two things from this year: To take the exact same type of team to the tournament, and have the exact same type of feeling as last year, but one set later.
"That's a fine line we have to cross," he says. "To be a team that plays well and also finishes."
Wagner hopes he'sbuilt a team of Greek legend. Cut off the head of the monster, and two more grow in its place.
Put in a more tactful way, graduate a decorated senior class of Jaimie Thibeault - three-time, first-team All-Big Sky Conference and Montana's leader in career blocks - Brittney Brown - the 2009 Big Sky Conference Libero of the Year - and Stephanie Turner - the glue that seemed to bring it all together late last season - and another one is popping up to take its place.
Enter Amy Roberts and Brittany Quick at the top of this year's roster and a promising three-player freshman class at the bottom. And the overall strengthening of the program under the sixth-year coach continues.
"We're losing a lot each year now," Wagner says. "And we actually want to lose good players, because that means we have good players in every class.
"We don't want to fluctuate. People leave, then others step in and create their own marks in the program."
Roberts was initially in the same class as Thibeault, but a season-ending knee injury 10 matches into the 2009 season dropped Roberts down a class. The outside hitter enters this season as the team's unquestioned leader.
"Amy's been through all the hard knocks, and her teammates have been able to observe her through the ups and downs," Wagner says.
"She works hard, and she makes sure everyone puts their best foot forward all the time. I couldn't ask for a more well-rounded individual."
Perhaps overlooked last season was the correlation between Roberts' tempered return from her knee injury and how it matched Montana's late-season surge.
Roberts took fewer than 40 swings in Montana's three early-season tournaments, and the Grizzlies won just two of their first nine.
Over the season's final five matches, Roberts averaged nearly 3.4 kills per set and mirrored the player she was pre-injury, when she was voted second-team All-Big Sky Conference as a sophomore.
"If you followed our progression last year, it matched how often we had Amy on the court," Wagner says.
"The more Amy was able to play throughout the year, the more consistent that became, the more she was able to bring us together, and the better we got.
"We'll have that from the get-go this year. On day one we're going to have that type of leadership from her on the court at an all-conference level."
Thibeault was one of the best middle blockers in Montana history, and for the last three years Quick was the player who made you forget Thibeault was even off the court. As Wagner puts it, the 1a to Thibeault's 1.
One season after earning honorable mention All-Big Sky accolades, Quick moves up the depth chart.
"This will be another progression for Brittany," Wagner says. "She's increased her role in what she's been counted on to do each year.
"For three years she's done everything she's been asked to do. This year she'll be counted on to do those things every night."
Her consistency on the court matches the regularity in which Wagner goes with a tuna sandwich and Clif Bar for lunch. It never varies or falters. In the case of the former, that's a good thing. As for the latter? Just go with it.
Quick hit .272 last season, fifth in the Big Sky Conference, and is a .283 hitter for her career, a mark that would rank third in Montana history behind only Karen Goff (.294) and Thibeault (.293).
Quick also ranked third in the Big Sky in blocks as a junior at 1.07 per set. She and Portland State's Lana Zielke were the only two players to rank in the top five in the Big Sky in both categories.
"With Amy and Brittany, we're in very good hands. They know what needs to be done," Wagner concluded about his seniors.
Wagner is bigon lists. The most important item on the desk in his office isn't a computer, a cell phone or a calendar. It's the notepad that lists his handwritten tasks for the day.
You can tell how his day and week are going by sneaking a peak at the balance between items still to be done and those that are crossed off with line straight enough that it makes you wonder if he uses a ruler to keep his list neat.
So it's no surprise that he goes into list mode when asked what has to happen in 2011 for his team to ultimately reach the point the 2010 team did.
He says there are three areas of concern, then he gives you four, which is just like an anxious coach in the days leading up to the season.
He seems to touch on every area of the game outside of serving (so we're left to assume that that part of his team's game is fine) and breaking the huddle (1-2-3 Griz!, also on lockdown).
First, he says his outside hitters need to produce at a higher percentage. This is a matter of particular importance in 2011 with the departure of Thibeault and her .293 career hitting percentage.
Thibeault and Quick combined to hit .269 last season, but the team finished at .169 overall, well below Wagner's annual goal of .200 and the lowest hitting percentage in Wagner's first five seasons at Montana.
Some quick math tells you last year's left- and right-side hitters combined to hit just .128. Improve that number and the four five-set losses last fall likely turn into wins.
Then you're looking at a 17-win team instead of one that went 13-15 and viewing the program in a slightly different way, because "17 wins" and "Montana volleyball" have not been matched up as a couple in over a decade and just once (18-9 in 1999) since the 1995 team went 25-6.
But it wasn't just last season. Wagner's middle blockers have been accounting for the high end of the hitting percentages since he took over in 2006 - though when Thibeault is on your roster, you go with what works.
"In the five years I've been here, we have not been the outside hitting team we need to be," the coach admits.
"From the left and right, it's got to be closer to .200 on a regular basis."
A healthy Roberts will help, as will the continued maturation of sophomore Kayla Reno.
Lost in Roberts' injury heartbreak was that she was approaching Dominant Left-side Hitter status at the very moment she landed awkwardly on her left leg while extending for a wide set against Arizona State in early September 2009.
In the four matches leading up to her injury, Roberts hit .287. In her 2010 return she hit .111 for the season while lugging around the millstone of a knee brace. She is brace-free in 2011 and should be set for a return to .200-plus greatness.
Reno was the Big Sky's top freshman outside hitter in 2010. She hit .188 for the season, .207 during Big Sky Conference play, and was second to Thibeault in kills at 2.54 per set.
The svelte, smooth one had periods of dominance, including a five-match stretch in late September and early October when she averaged 2.95 kills on .326 hitting.
Combined Roberts and Reno should be able to produce close to or better than .200 from the left side.
As for the right side and the personnel in that position, like hard-hitting junior Paige Branstiter, who played in 22 of 28 matches last season and averaged 1.58 kills per set, it's still up in the air until at least late August as Wagner allows his team time to show him its strengths and weaknesses.
Wagner's second area that he believes needs to be addressed is middle blocker.
Montana had the Big Sky's top one-two tandem last season in Thibeault and Quick. With Quick moving up, is there a potential 1a on the roster? And here the questions start to flow.
Will it be sophomore Brooke Bray, who played right side as a freshman but who would likely thrive anywhere on the court, including middle? Where do junior Emma Olgard and redshirt freshman Natalie Jones fit in? Could incoming freshman Capri Richardson, from Aurora, Colo. - likely the best blocker out of everyone, including Quick, because of her jumping ability - blossom quickly enough offensively in a full-time volleyball environment to play Robin to Quick's Batman?
"Those are all great questions," Wagner allows as a way to avoid giving an answer he does not have at the moment.
Instead the questions will answer themselves over the next two and a half weeks of practice leading up to Montana's season opener against South Carolina at Temple's tournament in Philadelphia the last weekend of August.
And possibly even beyond that.
"We need Brittany to go from 1a to 1, and we know she'll do that," Wagner says.
"What's unknown right now is who might fill our other middle position, and even what offense we'll be running."
And here you see Wagner's comfort in being flexible as a coach. Instead of entering the season with a made-up mind and a predetermined system, he's willing to let the players' strengths - whatever they turn out to be - make the decision for him.
"We don't have a set system at this point," he says, and he's not talking about just the middle. "That wouldn't be fair to the new players coming in, and it wouldn't account for the improvements made by our returning players since the end of last season."
Whatever Wagner decides upon, he knows the blocking numbers for the team that led the Big Sky Conference a year ago (2.67/s) are going to drop this season. When Jaimie Thibeault takes her exhausted eligibility and leaves the gym, that's going to happen no matter who steps in to fill her place.
What he doesn't want to have happen is much of a drop-off in hitting from his middle blockers.
"We need Brittany to be at or exceed her past numbers, in both blocking and hitting," Wagner says.
"And then we need someone else to step up as quickly as possible and be somebody that can be an effective offensive player who hits over .250."
You'll notice there is no mention of blocking, which leads to Wagner's third point of emphasis: "We need to continue to handle the ball at a high level."
Fewer blocks mean more balls that need to be handled from the back row. The departure of Brown would seem to make this an area of greater concern, but Wagner is more comfortable about this than the other three points he mentions.
Sophomore Megan Murphey, a potential redshirt in 2010, was inserted into the active roster after last season's first seven matches when the team's lack of consistent ball-handling forced Wagner into action.
Murphey's steadying presence in the back row last season is the reason Wagner's confidently got her pegged to be Brown's replacement at libero.
Freshman Kaitlyn Molloy, who at 5-8 played an undersized middle blocker in high school and club, was recruited as a left-side hitter and ball-handling addition and may have the same type of defensive role that Murphey had last season.
Reno improved in the ball-handling area as last season progressed, and Roberts has been a dynamic back-row player since her freshman year. Even last season, with all the limitations that came with recovering from a knee injury, she still averaged over three digs per set.
Wagner's final area of emphasis is at setter, which may be a surprise considering what Kortney James accomplished last season as a true freshman.
Wasn't her role in 2010 the football equivalent of a true freshman taking over the starting quarterback duties from the opening day of practice? And not only that, but being asked to be a drop-back passer after running the wildcat in high school?
Never a full-time setter in high school or club, James wasn't just the starting setter on a team picked to challenge for a Big Sky championship, she was the Please Don't Get Injured Because You Are the Only Setter We Have on this Year's Roster setter, which brings its own pressure.
She didn't get injured, and her assist average of 9.54 per set ranked third in the conference. Her season total of 1,011 was the best for a true freshman in Montana history.
"Kortney did a remarkable job of learning on the fly and developing into one of the upper-tier setters in the conference," Wagner says.
"In her high school and club career, she'd never been the only setter. For her to come into a different system than she was used to and succeed despite only having a handful of established hitters to work with says a lot about her.
"She's a winner, she's a good listener, and she works hard. All that went into making someone who wasn't going to get rattled. If she ever was, she did a great job of not showing it."
So ... shouldn't setter be an area of comfort for Wagner?
"We're going to ask Kortney to be more dynamic and more aggressive," he says, which somewhat provides an answer but leaves Joe Fan wondering what exactly the suspiciously vague Wagner really means. Some 360-degree sets, or maybe behind the back moves? More yelling?
"We're going to put more demands on her, because she has a lot more upside." And with that the conversation on the setter position comes to an unfulfilling end.
The reason Montana'smomentum keeps building toward a Big Sky Conference championship is because of the classes of players that continue to be added to the bottom of the program.
Last year it was Bray, James, Murphey and Reno. This year it's Molloy, Richardson and Kelsey Schile.
We're a long time removed from the end of the 2010 season, but Wagner can still be egged into getting fired up all over again when you get him to talk about what the Bray/James/Murphey/Reno foursome did in its first season.
"I couldn't be more excited about how the fre ... new-player class contributed last year," says the coach who catches himself anytime he almost utters the word "freshman."
"They went out and did exactly what they came here to do.
"Kayla established herself as one of the top left sides in the conference, and Brooke is one of those kids who is multi-faceted in how she can help the team.
"And I am confident Megan can handle our starting libero.
"I only see them hungrier and more confident going into the new season, so I'm expecting more of the same out of all four of them."
Of Wagner's newcomers, both Schile and Molloy are multi-faceted.
Schile, from Apple Valley, Minn., is a six-foot setter and outside hitter, which should give Wagner plenty of options to mull over when he's lying awake at night this month trying to put it all together in his mind.
As mentioned, Molloy, from Spanaway, Wash., played middle at 5-foot-8 in high school and club, but her ball-handling and mad ups (rumored to be at 57 inches ... and growing) make her more of a ball-handling, outside-hitting prospect.
It's all part of Wagner's plan for building a program that lasts.
"We're going to lose good players every year, but we are going to answer that by bringing more good players into the program who are going to develop," he says. "And I don't think anybody incorporates their new players into the team like we do.
"With this team we now have some depth, which is important for a few reasons."
Again with the lists.
"First, we're only going to be as good as we are No. 1 through No. 12.
"Second, we've got players who welcome and thrive on competition at their position.
"And third, with players who can do multiple things, we might be able to be successful any number of different ways this season."
What it comes down to is this. After back-to-back volleyball season previews with a Katy Perry reference - "California Gurls" found its way into the 2010 outlook - we might as well try for a third in 2012.
There appear to be two options: "The One That Got Away" or the much preferred "Firework." Just own the night, Grizzlies.
