Three Word Reviews: Volleyball 2023

With the 2023-2024 UCF Knights athletic year over and the relatively quiet summer months upon us, we’ll all now be looking to next season. But before we do that, we wanted to take a moment and go over this past year.

The entire Banneret staff will be taking a look at every team that represented UCF this past year and will have to try and describe how their seasons went. The only catch, we have to do it in three words or less.

Up next:

Volleyball

• Record: 17-12, 8-10 in the Big 12
• Preseason: Picked 9th
• Result: 7th
• Postseason: None

Courtesy of UCF Athletics

Nick: An adjustment year

A brand new coach. A new conference where your opponents are some of the best teams in college volleyball. A loss of players, including the greatest player in school history in McKenna Melville. Of course this team was gonna take a step back. That being said they stayed in matches against talented teams and while it’s disappointing they barely missed the tournament, this wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

Jeff: The schedule, WTF?

I think the biggest takeaway from the 2023 Volleyball season is the Big 12 needs to figure out a proper scheduling model for volleyball and quick.

New head coach Jenny Maurer got completely railroaded by the schedule in 2023. It was way back-loaded with the toughest opponents and six weekends were double-dips against the same opponent — three of them on the road (Cincy, Baylor and Houston). They finished worse than they deserved, losing 10 of the last 11 against eight ranked teams after starting 6-0. That was ridiculous.

Photo: Derek Warden

This year is more balanced, with 18 matches against 14 teams (Kansas, K-State, Cincy and WVU are the home-and-home opponents, but thankfully not at the same venue), although I personally favor 14 total matches. With four Pac-12 schools joining from more far-flung places, this will still be a challenge, although only Arizona State finished last season in the RPI Top 40. We’ll see how it works out.

Bryson: Great Before Gauntlet

The big question this team had was what was it going to look like in the post-McKenna Melville and post-Dagenais eras? From mid-October on, they were going to face the class of the Big 12, five of the seven teams ranked in the Top 25, not the types of teams you want to face in a retooling year.

However, every match before that is a great test to see what this team could do, and they delivered, going 16-2, with their only losses being a five-setter to an ACC team and #17 Purdue.

The Knights proved that they were still a solid volleyball team in the Post-Melville era that can stack up right in the middle of the Big 12. Now that they know that, they can focus on gearing back up to try and join some of the teams they lost too in the Top 25, and hopefully with a more evenly spread out schedule.