Gamecocks volleyball had to sweat it out, but the remarkable turnaround continues
For this South Carolina volleyball team, there are two moments that say lot about how the Gamecocks ended up here.
One came a couple years ago, the other a few weeks back.
South Carolina is set to take on Colorado State in Seattle, Washington at 8 p.m. Friday. Tom Mendoza’s squad (19-11) is in its second NCAA tournament in as many years, only the third time that’s been done in the program’s history.
That it happened so fast stands out, as Mendoza only arrived last season. That it happened at all owes to something rather rare in the oft-uncertain world of college sports: a team holding together in the midst of transition.
“It was really important for us to all rely on each other,” senior Claire Edwards said. “When we were going through that coaching change, we were all we had, plus (assistant coach Shonda Cole Wallace), so to be able to stay together like that kind of made us even closer as a team than we already were, and we had faith that we were going to stick together no matter what.”
Their team had come off a year with a losing record and a 5-13 mark in the SEC. Head coach Scott Swanson was fired mid-season.
In the face of that sort of turmoil, many athletes look for new starts — Things haven’t worked out. The future is anything but certain. Who knows if the new coach wants the players on hand? — but that didn’t happen for the Gamecocks.
The core stayed, bonded and held together, all the way through the interim stretch and coaching search.
Junior hitter Jess Vastine said it had almost become a running joke how quickly the Gamecocks were able to turn things.
“We were ready for it,” Vastine said. “We never had any problems as a team before. We had loved each other since day one, even when we were losing a lot, which is good and I think that’s what really held us together through the transitions.
“The team love and the team family aspect pulled us through all that.”
And after all that, they still had to weather a rather queasy final few weeks of the season.
At season’s start, Mendoza had pegged 19 wins as a goal to reach. The schedule difficulty was turned up. And then on Nov. 17, they sat at 16 victories with four matches left.
They locked in, won at Georgia and Auburn, dropped one to Texas A&M and capped the regular season with a sweep of Arkansas for No. 19.
That left them confident, at least for a moment.
“There’s external factors as well, especially conference tournaments,” Mendoza said. “And about every one of those went the wrong way. So we thought we’d be safe by about four teams or maybe a little bit more, and that was about how many things went wrong. So, all of a sudden it got the selection show and we were a little bit more on the edge of our seats than we thought we would be.”
But they made it through, a squad two years removed from disarray and not a regular tournament team.
There was something a little tricky in the roster transition from last season, Mendoza said. The 2018 Gamecocks had only four seniors, but losing the members of the group required some adjusting.
At some point in their upcoming trip to the Pacific Northwest, the Gamecocks will get to see one of those seniors. Courtney Furlong is now a graduate assistant at Winthrop, which will face the host Huskies on the other side of the bracket.
“I’m really excited to see her,” junior middle blocker Mikayla Robinson said. We actually saw her this weekend, so it’s gonna be great seeing her this weekend again too.”
South Carolina will face off against a Rams team that started the season 1-1 and then ripped off 28 consecutive wins. They’ve got a 28.3 hitting percentage and are holding opponents to 10.4.
And USC took something from the experience last year, where they beat the Colorado Buffaloes in the first round. They’ve been through this before, so this moment won’t be all that unfamiliar.
“It’s just going to be the same thing that we’ve been doing,” senior Mikayla Shields said. “We’ve been playing good teams, we’ve been playing good volleyball. So it’s really just going to be an exercise in making sure that we do the things that help us win every day in practice and every day that we step onto the court.”
