After a long offseason, I always look forward to going to one of the first road tournaments. While I did get to attend the first match, I missed the second day of competition due to a medical issue. While minor, it is ongoing and definitely limits the amount of time I can spend at the computer. Hopefully I’ll be back 100% very soon and can get back to diving into volleyball stats! Until then, here are some quick tidbits about the opening weekend.

• Since 1978, the Lady Vols are 29-8 in season opening matches. Under Coach Rob Patrick the team is 14-4. The team has won six of their last seven season openers.
• Tennessee started the season off with a sweep for the first time in five years.
• The Lady Vols have started off the season vs an in-state rival twelve times since 1978, and are undefeated. They’re 36-2 in sets in those games, not coming away with a sweep only twice.
• Fourteen of the sixteen players on UT’s roster saw action this weekend.
• Lexi Dempsey and Kanisha Jimenez picked up double doubles, both during the Cleveland State match. Jimenez’ were with kills and digs, while Dempsey’s were with assists and digs. Dempsey has notched 17 double doubles in her career — the ninth most of any Lady Vol in the rally-scoring era.
• The SEC went 11-2 in their opening matches, with only LSU and Mississippi State losing their first games.
• Some photos from the Tennessee Tech match are now online. The lighting at the arena wasn’t great, so neither are the pictures. I also didn’t take many because I assumed I would have the whole weekend to try to get a good shot of everyone.
• The stats have been updated, both on the roster pages and the stats database pages. A kind of fun thing to check out (if checking out volleyball stats is your idea of fun!) is the all-time season record pages. Besides listing the records, the bottom of each page projects how the current players might finish the season at their current pace. For example, with seventeen blocks in the first three matches Iesha Bryant might reach 181 total blocks this year, which would be good for third place in program history. (Please don’t take those numbers too seriously though, especially this early in the season. They will get more accurate as more info is fed in, but even then they’re not meant to be anything other than an potentially interesting data point.)