The Volleyball Bulls dropped two matches at the Penn State Classic, losing 3–0 to Villanova and 3–1 to Stony Brook on Saturday. Throughout the two matches, Buffalo struggled to generate consistent offense and consistent defense.

The good news is that when Buffalo won the second set against Stony Brook, they looked extremely sharp. The passing by the back row was dead-on to senior setter Marissa Prinzbach, who then set perfect balls to her attackers. The blocking seemed to come to life, and senior right-side hitter Akeila Lain and sophomore middle blocker Cassie Shado and senior middle blocker Amber Hatchett dominated the front line of Stony Brook. Buffalo had been trailing 10–8 and they wound up winning the set 25–18. We have always known that this core group of players can play this well, but like a year ago, consistency can be a problem. Buffalo continued their sharp play into the third set, and even led 22–20, but then the wheels came off. Stony Brook scored five straight points to win the third set and the Seawolves continued their momentum into the fourth set, which they won by a lopsided score to win the match.

So, right now Buffalo has an 0–3 record, and a lot of work to do. What is clear is that this team is being coached very differently by coach Blair Brown Lipsitz than they were coached a year ago under Reed Sunahara. It's too early to say if those differences will translate into long-term success, but I think it's clear that those differences are causing Buffalo to go through a period of adjustment, and contributes to the team's struggles.

What differences? I'm glad you asked! Specifically:

• Substitutions: Lipsitz played only 9 players during this tournament, and so five players (including four freshmen) never saw the court. In fact, the only freshmen to play were Raven Jordan and Valisha Watkins, both outside hitters. Even when it was clear Buffalo was playing a set which had a lopsided score, the substitutes were not sent in. A year ago, Sunahara used all 13 healthy players in the teams 6th match of the season against South Carolina State. Also, Sunahara was very willing to go to his bench when a player on the court wasn't performing well. On occasion, he removed outside hitter Megan Lipski from the lineup, and once even removed outside hitter Tahleia Bishop (the team's best player last year) when she wasn't performing well. Lipsitz didn't make those substitutions when a player was struggling. I can only speculate as to why Lipsitz is not using her bench more, and the only reason I can come up with is that she doesn't have enough confidence to use those reserves.
  


• Offense: A year ago, I complained for the last month of the season that Buffalo wasn't getting the ball to their right side hitters enough. That problem is now gone, Lain is averaging 7.1 attacks per set (compared to 3.25 attacks per set for last year's right side hitter), but the effectiveness of this strategy so far has been low. It is clear that Prinzbach is regularly sending the ball in Lain's direction. Lain is now playing back row for the first time in her collegiate career, and also attacking from the back row, which has been extremely ineffective. Lain took a lot of back row attacks (the box score doesn't distinguish front and back row attacks), and scored on only two of them, both late in the match against Stony Brook. Lain, for the year, is hitting negative. Lipski also is getting set when she is in the back row, something that had happened on an occasional basis a year ago, but now is happening frequently. Lipski's effectiveness at scoring from the back row has been low, I don't think she scored at all on her back row attacks.
  
  Naturally, the idea of making these changes is to have more attackers on the court at all times, giving the defense more things to worry about. Only time will tell if Lain and Lipski can generate enough offense from back row attacks to make this change worthwhile. Naturally, the more sets go to back row players, that means fewer go to front row players, where the hitting percentage ought to be higher. Also largely missing from the offense was the slide. During Buffalo's strong second set against Stony Brook, Hatchett scored on a beautiful slide play, and we hadn't seen that play at all up until that time. To Buffalo's credit, they went back to that play and Hatchett scored a total of four times on that play against Stony Brook. And the setter dump from Prinzbach also didn't appear in the offense. Prinzbach isn't the strongest offensive weapon amongst the setters of the world, but she did have 14 kills last year on that play. This year, so far, it hasn't been attempted.
  


• Defense: an urgent issue for Buffalo is to fix the indecisiveness shown by the back row players regarding who is supposed to play certain balls. Many times, two or more Buffalo players would look at a playable ball and think it wasn't their responsibility to contact the ball, only to see the ball fall to the floor, or someone makes an emergency dive towards the ball and keeps the ball off the floor, but results in a poor pass. The opposite happened too. On the first play of the fourth set, Stony Brook sent the ball over the net and Lipski positioned herself to play the ball, and then libero Niki Bozinoski bumped into Lipski, also trying to play the ball, causing the ball to fall to the floor. One almost comical example happened later, when a Stony Brook attack was dug backwards, towards the endzone bleachers, and Lipski, being closest to the ball, took off in pursuit, hoping to send it back toward the net so someone could play it over on the third touch. The problem was that all of the UB players on the court — every single one of them — some of them 15 feet further away from the ball than Lipski, also took off in pursuit of the ball. If Lipski had reached the ball and sent it back towards the net, there would have been no one there to hit it over the net.
  
  While these types of problems happen to all teams on rare occasions, it has happened to Buffalo far too frequently, especially since Buffalo's back row players all played together last year and didn't have this problem last year except on rare occasions. And you can't blame this on the fact that its early in the season, because the other three teams in the tournament didn't have this problem. It appears to me that the court coverage responsibilities have changed from what they were a year ago, and this is something that Buffalo will have to work on and get better at. Why have the court coverage responsibilities changed? I speculate that Lipsitz has made this change so that Lain and Hatchett can play backcourt — Hatchett, like Lain, has never played backcourt before in her UB career.
  
  The other problem this causes is that Lain and Hatchett have to play backcourt defense, something they have never done in college. Lain struggled at this, and it was clear that as a backcourt player, she doesn't have the speed and agility that a typical defensive specialist would have. Lain has 13 digs in 10 sets so far, but there's no stat for "digs missed" or a sabremetric style "digs compared to replacement", and if there was, I don't think the numbers would be good. Hatchett seemed to play better in the backcourt with 9 digs, but because of the rotation pattern, her dig numbers aren't directly comparable to Lain's. Hatchett was playing only 1/2 of one rotation in the backcourt (only on points where she was the server), while Lain was playing all three rotations in the back court. Again, only time will tell if this is going to work better or not.
  

Hatchett and Shado had the best series for the Bulls. Shado leads the team with 2 kills per set and a 0.240 hitting percentage, while Hatchett is not far behind at 1.6 kills per set and a 0.222 hitting percentage. Lipski has 1.7 kills per set, and Watkins has 1.56, but is hitting negative. Shado leads the team with 16 blocks, Hatchett has 10 and Lain has 9.

Notes:

• Hatchett was named to the All-Tournament team.
• Lain did pick up her first ace of her career, and Hatchett scored her first four aces of her career.
• There was lots of grumbling amongst the UB fans (not just parents and relatives) in attendance about the fact that most of the freshman didn't get to play.
• Big Ten referee Mike Paull also referees a lot of matches at Alumni Arena.
• Reminiscent of #UBMopGuy, the #PSUMopGuy got a round of applause from the crowd, but I don't know why.