The University of Texas at Austin Athletics
University of Texas
30-2
Minnesota
30-5
No. 3 Volleyball tops No. 2 Minnesota, 3-1, advances to NCAA title match
12.17.2015 | Volleyball
Longhorns will take on fourth-seeded Nebraska in Saturday's NCAA title match at 6:30 p.m. CT (ESPN2)
OMAHA, Neb. – Third-seeded Texas (30-2) picked up a career-high 25 kills from Big 12 Player of the Year Amy Neal and 19 kills from All-America junior Paulina Prieto Cerame as the Longhorns held off second-seeded Minnesota (30-5) by a 3-1 count (26-24, 27-25, 23-25, 25-21) Thursday in the semifinals of the 2015 NCAA Volleyball Championship.
Texas will make its fifth finals appearance at the NCAA Volleyball Championship and its first since 2012, when the Longhorns won their second NCAA title to go with an AIAW national crown. The Longhorns will take on fourth-seeded Nebraska in the national title match Saturday at 6:30 p.m. CT. The match will air live on ESPN2.
Texas freshman Yaasmeen Bedart-Ghani notched a career-high 15 kills and didn't make an error until the penultimate point of the match. Junior setter Chloe Collins dished out 64 assists while sophomore Cat McCoy recorded a match-high 20 digs.
Texas led 22-19 in the opening set, but Minnesota picked up two kills from Daly Santana and another from Sarah Wilhite to even the score at 22. UT's Prieto Cerame and Minnesota's Santana exchanged kills on the next four points as the set progressed to 24-all. Another Prieto Cerame kill gave Texas its second set point. Kat Brooks prevented the Golden Gophers from saving another, as her soft jump serve fell untouched and gave the Horns a 26-24 first-set win.
Texas prevailed in a tightly-contested second set where neither team led by more than two points at any stretch. At 23-all, Prieto Cerame pounded a kill to produce the Horns' first set point, but Hannah Tapp answered for 24-all. Bedart-Ghani put away another kill to give Texas its second set point, but Hannah Tapp responded once more and evened the set at 25.
A dump over the net from Collins gave Texas a third set point it ultimately converted. Minnesota's Wilhite fired long on the ensuing point to give the Longhorns the second set, 27-25.
Texas held a 20-18 lead in the third set, but Minnesota ran off five consecutive points to assume a 23-20 cushion. A Bedart-Ghani kill and an errant swing from Hannah Tapp cut the Minnesota lead to 23-22, but a block on the ensuing point set up match points for the Golden Gophers at 24-22.
Texas' Neal put away the Horns' 23rd point of the set, but Hannah Tapp closed out a 25-23 third-set win for Minnesota.
Minnesota went toe-to-toe with the Longhorns midway through the fourth set at 15-all. But, a double block from Texas freshmen Morgan Johnson and Bedart-Ghani sparked the Longhorns through the remainder of the set. Bedart-Ghani pounded another kill for a 17-15 Texas lead, and a Collins service ace put Texas up 18-15 and prompted a Minnesota timeout.
Paige Tapp pulled Minnesota within 18-16, and an errant Prieto Cerame swing cut the Texas lead to 18-17. However, the Longhorns staved off the Golden Gophers from that point forward. Santana's swing ran just long on the next point, and Hannah Tapp went wide on the next point as Texas pushed its lead to 20-17.
Brooks produced another service ace for 21-17, and Neal produced another kill for a 22-17 Texas lead.
The Golden Gophers saved two match points, but with Texas leading 24-21, Neal put away her match-high 25th kill on the third match point to seal the win for the Longhorns.
A photo gallery and post-game reaction will be available later this evening at TexasSports.com.
2015 NCAAÒ DIVISION I WOmen's Volleyball
National Semifinal · Texas (30-2) 3
vs. Minnesota (30-5) 1
CenturyLink Center · Omaha, Nebraska
Thursday, December 17
SEMIFINAL #1 POSTMATCH NOTES
NCAA Notes
- For the first time in NCAA Semifinal/Final history, the first two sets went to extra points.
- In the second set, neither team led by more than two points.
- The first four-point lead by either team came in the 156th rally of the match. The match was within two points for 176 of the 196 rallies, including 142-of-150 rallies in the first three sets.
- Texas improves to 84-29 all-time in NCAA Tournament matches and advances to its fifth national championship match in program history. The Longhorns won the national title in 1988 and 2012, while taking runner-up honors in 1995 and 2009.
- Minnesota falls to 43-20 all-time in NCAA Tournament matches.
Texas Notes
- Seniors Molly McCage, Amy Neal and Kat Brooks became the first Longhorn senior class to make four consecutive national semifinals and finals. Texas' senior class is now 113-12 (.904), the best senior class in program history by winning percentage.
- Amy Neal had seven kills in the first set for Texas, matching her output in 41 sets played as a freshman for the Longhorns in 2012. Neal finished the match with a career-high 25 kills, her 23rd straight match with 10 or more kills, and fourth time this season she's collected 20 or more terminations. Her previous season and career-high had been 24 against Arizona on Sept. 18, 2015.
- Texas won the first set, 26-24, on an ace by Kat Brooks. It was Brooks' 17th service winner of the fall, and the 57th ace of her career.
- Chloe Collins produced her ninth double-double of the fall, finishing with 64 assists and 16 digs for the Longhorns. Her 64 assists were a career-high, one more than her previous est vs. Arizona on Sept. 18, 2015.
- -Texas freshman Yaazie Bedart-Ghani had a career-high in kills, finishing with 15. Her previous high of nine came on Dec. 4 in the Round of 32 against No. 17 Purdue.
- Texas MB Chiaka Ogbogu, who leads the Big 12 in hitting percentage at .411, hit .444 to improve her season hitting percentage to .412.
- Morgan Johnson came in for Chicaka Ogbogu in the fourth set and recorded her first block since October 11th vs. Oklahoma. Johnson also had two digs, a career-high for the freshman.
- Molly McCage increased her school-record career block assist record to 458 with two more tonight.
- Texas was 20-0 this year when leading 2-0 in sets. All 20 previous times it went on to win the third set to complete the sweep.
- Texas improved to 24-0 when winning the first set this year.
- Texas appeared in its 11th semifinal in program history (also 1986, 1987, 1988, 1995, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013 and 2014). The Longhorns are now 5-6 in the semifinal round, including a 3-4 mark under Jerritt Elliott.
- Texas won its 12th straight match to improve to 30-2 on the season, including a 4-0 record against teams that reached the NCAA semifinals (also 2-0 vs. Kansas and 1-0 vs. Nebraska).
- Texas coach Jerritt Elliott became the 10th coach to lead his team to six or more national semifinals. Nebraska coach John Cook will become the 11th in tonight's second semifinal.
- Texas is now 84-29 all-time in NCAA Tournament play, the fifth-most postseason wins in NCAA history and one behind UCLA's 85 triumphs for fourth place.
- This is the first Texas team to earn 30 or more wins since the 1993 team finished 31-3, and the program's 12th overall 30-win campaign.
- Texas improves to 30-2 to temporarily tie Kansas for the nation's best winning percentage (.938) this year. Kansas plays in tonight's second semifinal.
- Texas improved to 4-4 all-time against Minnesota and has now won consecutive meetings against Golden Gophers for the first time in program history.
- This is the first time Texas has led a match 2-0 at the National semifinals and final since its 2012 sweep over Oregon in the national championship match. Texas has won 112 straight matches when leading 2-0 since losing a 2-0 lead to Penn State in the 2009 national title match.
- Texas improved to 24-0 when tied or leading in digs
- Texas improved to 30-0 when leading in attack percentage.
- Texas improved to 24-0 when tied or leading in aces
- Texas improved to 29-0 when holding teams under .300 hitting this fall
Minnesota Notes
- Tonight marked Minnesota's fourth appearance in the NCAA semifinals with the others coming in 2003, 2004 and 2009.
- With tonight's loss, Minnesota ends its season with a 30-5 mark. It marked Minnesota's first 30-win season since 2004, when Minnesota went 33-5 en route to an NCAA runner-up finish.
- Minnesota falls to 4-4 all-time against Texas, including 0-2 in the NCAA Tournament. The Golden Gophers also lost to the Longhorns in the 2009 NCAA semifinals in St. Petersburg, Fla.
- Minnesota entered the national semifinals leading all teams in hitting percentage (.368). Texas held Minnesota to .271 hitting. Minnesota's .342 team hitting percentage after tonight's semifinal remains the highest in the NCAA Tournament.
- Texas' .296 hitting percentage was the highest hitting percentage against Minnesota in 2015. The previous high by a Golden Gopher opponent was .269 by Illinois in the regional semifinal on Dec. 11. Only 11 teams hit over .200 against Minnesota in 2015, and the Gophers went 7-4 in those matches.
- Tonight marked the fifth time this season that Minnesota has trailed 2-0. Minnesota finished 1-4 in 2015 when dropping the first two sets with the win coming against Ohio State on Nov. 25.
- Big Ten Player of the Year and first-team All-American Santana Daly finished with 21 kills against Texas, moving from 10th to seventh on Minnesota's single-season list with 584 kills. She moved past Nicole Branagh (578, 1998) with her first kill of the fourth set.
- Santana now has 10 matches with 20+ kills this season, including twice in the NCAA Tournament (26 vs. Hawai'I in the regional final)
- Santana finished with 21 kills and 10 digs for her 21st double-double of the season and 48th of her career.
- Santana finished her career with 1,644 career kills (seventh all-time at Minnesota) and 1,280 digs (ninth).
- With 11 blocks tonight, Minnesota now has 10 or more blocks in 21 of its 35 matches in 2015.
- First-team All-American Hannah Tapp finished with 18 kills, which was her third-highest total of the season. Tapp had at least 15 kills in Minnesota's final three NCAA Tournament. Tapp's eight blocks was her highest total since recording a career-high 10 blocks against Northwestern on Nov. 11
- Dalianliz Rosado finished with a team-high 20 digs, her 10th match with at least 20 digs this season. Rosado finished the year with 539 digs, a total which is seventh on Minnesota's single-season chart.
- Hugh McCutcheon, who was named AVCA National Coach of the Year on Thursday, becoming the first Minnesota coach to earn the honor.
- Minnesota lost the first set for the just eighth time this season and for the first time since Nov. 25, against Ohio State.
- Minnesota falls to 24-3 this season when recording more blocks, as the Golden Gophers out-blocked Texas, 11-8.
- Minnesota falls to 7-1 in four-set matches in 2015.
NCAA Women's Volleyball Championship Thursday, December 17, 2015
Jerritt Elliott Chloe Collins Yaasmeen Bedart- Ghani
Paulina Prieto
Cerame
Texas Longhorns
THE MODERATOR: We'll go ahead and get started. Tonight for Texas, we have Head Coach Jerritt Elliott, Yaazie Bedart-Ghani, Chloe Collins and Paulina Prieto Cerame. Texas advances to Saturday's national championship match at 6:30, with a record of 30 and 2.
Coach, if you'll start with an opening statement, we will open the floor to questions.
COACH ELLIOTT: Well, I think that was a very high- level match. I think both teams played extremely steady. You look at the side out percentages and the way the team plays and the hitting percentage, I think it was a big time semi-final match, which is great for our sport to grow it.
But we have a tremendous amount of respect for Minnesota. I think Hugh had an excellent game plan to go against us. I thought our serving did a nice job to get them out of situations. And I'm proud of this group. This is a team that never gives up. There's a reason why I love coaching this group. We lose Chi and freshmen Mo comes in, and we're able to kind of step up our game and play well. And this is, just the way that we played tonight was remarkable.
For Yaazie to play the way that she did as a freshman and with no nerves is a tribute to her. But, also, I think it's a tribute to our culture in terms of getting her ready.
I thought Chloe ran a great offense with our passers doing a nice job. I think it was an all around great match for us. It's hard for a team like Minnesota to go home playing that well. That could have gone either way. The first two sets, we got a big ace and made a couple big plays at the end. But I don't know, my mind's kind of racing as you can hear, why I'm all over the place. I'm excited for this group and so glad that I have another two days with them.
THE MODERATOR: We'll open the floor for questions.
Q. Yaazie, what is your journey been like this year coming in as a freshman and then having probably what was your best match of your career thus far. YAASMEEN BEDART-GHANI: I've just been building, each game, each practice, and I have such a great support group here. And they just really push you to be the best that you can be.
So, just going out there and working hard every day with them has probably made like so much of a difference in my game.
Q. Chloe, Yaazie was -- obviously, she's a freshman and she didn't play a lot the first half of this season. Did it take you a while to figure out where she likes the ball and get on the same page with her. And if so, has it finally clicked, because she's had her best matches here in the NCAA tournament?
CHLOE COLLINS: I think over time we developed that chemistry throughout practice. Even though Yaazie wasn't playing as much during the season, we would definitely get those reps in in practice so the chemistry was always there. It's just constantly building every match and through every practice and she's done really well. I'm extremely happy for her.
Q. Coach, can you give us an update on Chi's status and if she will be available Saturday night?
COACH ELLIOTT: She will be fine. It had nothing to do with conditioning, she was just cramping. I think some of the nerves maybe this -- she has a tendency that can happen. It's happened before in the season. So, we just had to -- we thought we were able to manage it through kind of a half a game, and then it got worse. And we made a decision to get her some medical attention to try to see if we could get her back in case we went to game five. But I have no worries that she will be back, no concerns.
Q. Coach, when either Kansas or Nebraska look at the tape, they're going to see that the slide for Minnesota was, just, almost 95 percent successful. What did you want your athletes to do? What did they fail to do? What would you like them to do if Nebraska or Kansas comes back?
COACH ELLIOTT: If this is a little team that could. We got some matchup issues. Amy's not a very big blocker, Chloe is not a very big blocker. We've got some situations where we've got to be smart, we've got to be good with our serving and get them off the net. And I think that's what we were able to do to get them into some predictable situations.
But at this level you're going to face that. I think what we have is what our seniors have kind of labeled as amnesia. We let the big swings go and just got to be good with our offense. We don't have ways to counteract it. I thought that with the speed of it we got to be a little bit more -- we got to get over a little bit sooner and reach.
But when you run an offense like that, where you got a one and a wave, you got to respect the middle, but they're going to get one-on-one all the time. So, you hopefully do a good job with the matchups in terms of servers and some of the things that we were able to do helped us kind of get out of that.
Q. Coach, passing was an issue early in this season, ball control, a lot of people would say, Texas, if they could pass the ball there's no place they can't go. What were you successful in doing all season long to better that aspect of the game beyond just simple reps?
COACH ELLIOTT: I think Eric, my assistant, does a phenomenal job training it, and we have just been building over it.
But one of the keys is, one of the people that don't get any recognition on this team is Nicole Dalton. She was one of the reasons we won in 2012 as a DS. She's been injured, she's coming back from an injury, she wasn't able to win the starting spot with the setting and Chloe's done a phenomenal job and Nicole has now taken on a role that helps this team. And it shows a lot about what kind of people we have.
But not only is she a great passer, but she has great mentality back there and adds a calmness. So, I think we have got four good really solid passers, and we can do so some things with it and we can control the ball. And this is one of the best passing teams we have had. Not one of the most physical, but we have been able to control the ball. And with our two middles being able to hit behind, we can do some different things that can give us some advantages matchup-wise, even though we're a little bit smaller and give away some other areas. But ball control has been the staple point for this team.
Q. Coach, Yaazie didn't play a lot in the first half of the season. Was she injured or had she just not earned her way into the lineup? And talk about that, where she came from and now where she is, where she's had these last four matches have been her best of the year.
COACH ELLIOTT: Well, we knew she was good. I think Yaazie, from day one, came in committed to what she needed to do to get better. Early on, in the early practices, we had the freshmen of the year that transferred in that was playing on the right side and Yaazie was competing on the left side and had some really good practices and was battling that.
Then when we lost her, we made a concerted effort to get her over to the right. But it took a week or two to kind of get it going. And in our gym you got to prove that you can kind of get to that point. After about a week, you could just see that gaining some momentum and taking some good swings. And early on in the season, I think she was just swinging as hard as she could and kind of figuring it out. And now she's starting to get some range and some belief and able to deal with some longer balls. We've been training her more at a system and longer sets and she's done a phenomenal job on that.
But the best thing about her is that she's got a confidence about herself that she doesn't need any kind of stroking from a coaching staff to convince her what she's good. I think she has that mentality. I think she embraces these situations and I think it shows a lot to our upperclassmen to what you're doing. And that's happened, some of the things that she's done in the timeouts over the year, you can see what her confidence level as a young athlete is.
Q. Chloe, in the first set it was 15-15, no, 13-15. You executed a setter dump, and then you appeared to strut and Minnesota appeared to notice and was not happy, I think. I don't know. On the very next play they got a setter dump, their freshman, right back on you. But from then on when you would do that, you either looked right up at the ref or otherwise. Did somebody tell you not to do that? Was there any conversation about what you were doing or not doing out there in your celebration?
CHLOE COLLINS: That was just me in the moment. I was really excited for myself and the team and we got the point. Throughout practice Jerritt and I always discuss like moments when I should dump, when I shouldn't dump, and that was just one of the moments when I actually executed. So I was just caught up there. And as far as the other moments me tipping, it was just trying to have another one of those straight- down moments that didn't happen that way.
Q. Paulina, you came through in the clutch against Florida and then that first set you seemed very comfortable. Have you been growing and just feeling more comfortable late in sets and late in matches this year?
PAULINA PRIETO CERAME: I think, just with the experience that I've had and having Yaazie and other newbies in the court has made me have to step up as a veteran, and I think that's given me confidence. And I give a lot of credit to my teammates and our chemistry as to why I'm so confident about myself and each other.
Q. Coach, when Chiaka went out, they clearly wanted to go after your freshman middle. But can you talk about weathering that storm, other players maybe stepping up their games around her?
COACH ELLIOTT: Yeah, it started to happen in game two. So I was, early on, I was communicating with Mo saying, hey, this is your time -- she's been great in practice -- we have a lot of confidence in you, and let's go out there and have some fun and enjoy this moment and be the confident young lady that you can be. I
think the telling, it happened we got stuck in rotation six, that's where it's ours, it's Paulina and her in there, so we only have two hitters, so the tendency is that you kind of ignore that player early on. I think that's what they did. So I called a timeout and just I called a one and made them stay and try to get them to commit and Paulina just actually went over them and got the big sideout and then we were able to sideout the next time. They scored two points and then we went away with Amy on the white to try to counteract some of the following that they were doing. Because when teams scheme, then the middle of the net is wide open. And Amy took a great swing. So it's a tribute to Chloe knowing what's going on, making good decisions, Paulina stepping up, and she's grown so much with her confidence and belief and I think she's embracing the big swings right now.
THE MODERATOR: Congratulations to Texas on advancing to Saturday's national championship.
COACH ELLIOTT: Thank you.
