No more speculation required! Tennessee has announced the schedule for the 2011 season. The dates and teams in the previous post were correct. And Louisville (with new assistant Dani Busboom) is on the schedule in November.

• Tennessee will face 11 different teams that made the 2010 NCAA Tournament — 6 non-conference opponents and 5 SEC teams.

• This is just the second season in Lady Vol volleyball history where the team is not scheduled to play an opponent from the state of Tennessee.

• Four of Tennessee’s non-conference opponents this year will be looking for payback after being defeated by the Lady Vols last year.

• The average 2010 RPI of Tennessee’s non-conference opponents this season is 61.5. Two teams were in the top 15, four teams were in the top 40, and eight teams were in the top 80.

Coach Rob Patrick: “We have two goals when we put our schedule together every season. First, we want to use our non-conference schedule to prepare us for success in our SEC matches. Second, we want a schedule that will help us at the end of the season in terms of our RPI so that we can better position ourselves for the NCAA Tournament. After having a really young team last year with three freshmen and two sophomores on the court quite a bit, we feel like we have a pretty experienced team and that allowed us to put together an even more difficult schedule than usual. We will face at least one, if not two, NCAA Tournament teams in every tournament we play in this season. It is important that we have those consistent challenges early in our schedule so that we can learn never to take a match off. The goal is to prepare us for SEC play when any team can win on any given day. We have to be ready to play every single match and, hopefully, our non-conference schedule will teach us that important lesson.”