I walk to work every morning, and back home from it most days. Three doors down (incidentally enough) from my house is this other house, surrounded by a fence. I have to walk by it to get to and from work, or else take a laughably circuitous route.
The family that live in that house have a dog. A loud dog. As if there's any other kind. Sometimes it's out in the yard when I walk by, sometimes not.
As I mentioned once on my writing blog, I'm kind of afraid of dogs. Not a crippling fear or anything, and if you've got a puppy that loves to lick faces, I can usually warm to the puppy. But generally speaking? I don't do so well around unfamiliar dogs.
This particular dog loves to use its voice. And it scares the crap out of me. If I'm walking by the house (which I don't always do — sometimes I cross the street to avoid walking directly next to this house, even though that doesn't help me get to work any quicker) and the dog is there, and it barks at me, I usually just sprint past the house.
And there's this rational 2% of my brain that's saying things like "This dog has probably never actually harmed anyone. Even if it has, it's behind a fence, it can't reach me."
The irrational 98% is saying "RUN YOU IDIOT!"
Which brings me to last night.
I wasn't on hand here to do any webcast write-ups because I was at another live match. My alma mater, the Western Washington Vikings faced the Alaska Anchorage Seawolves, with first place in our Great Northwest Athletic Conference on the line.
Sometime this week, I'll do a substantive D2-to-date post. It's something I've been meaning to do. I'll give a look-see to each of the eight geographic regions, but for right now, a little west coast bias.
Both WWU and UAA entered last night's match undefeated in the league. Our girls entered having not even dropped a set in conference play, a trend I didn't expect to continue.
I didn't plan to play pissant media member last evening. I left the voice recorder at home, for a number of interrelated reasons. One, simply because it was such a big match. I didn't want to disrupt anyone. Brief aside – maybe that makes me a poor pissant media member, but as far as I'm concerned, I just like watching and writing about volleyball. If others want to talk to me, so much the better. Two, I wouldn't have had anything important to ask. Three, I had the feeling it was going to be a long night anyway.
And indeed it was.
Our side won the first set, but only after a near collapse. We led something like 23-18 and only just held on 25-23. Then the Seawolves won the second 26-24, after our girls fought off one set point but not the second. Anchorage won the third set as well, by 25-23. It was a very evenly-fought match. Both teams played superlative defence, executed solid offence….there were a great deal of long rallies.
We won the fourth set by the most comfortable margin of the night, 25-19. That set up the always-exciting race to 15.
But right away I knew we were in trouble. The sets we won involved us jumping out to a big lead and staving off a comeback, but the Seawolves took three of the first four in the decider. Even in a set to only 15, that's a bit early to be waving the white flag, but I just had the feeling, you know?
And sure enough, they reached match point on 14-10. We staved off two, but not the third, and the Seawolves left victorious. Another good reason for me to have left everyone alone. No sense bugging them after a rare loss (rare home loss anyway — first in two years and only the second in the last four years). The Anchorage coach, a free-spirited fellow by the looks of him (not someone I remembered from my PA days) may or may not have given me a flash. I didn't really care for one. Needed to head home, catch a nap before work.
As I strolled home, I immediately went to worst-case scenario. I had entertained notions that we might end up hosting regionals if we ran the table in conference. There's still BYU-Hawaii (more on them in a sec) to think about, and they were a couple notches higher than us in the national rankings in the last poll. But regionals are based on the seldom-monitored regional polls, which don't necessarily correspond to the national. With the loss, though, the idea of hosting is right out the window.
I thought of the return match in Anchorage later this season. That match greatly favours the Seawolves in terms of home-court advantage, more so than ours did last night. Think about it — the Alaska teams come south all the time, but we down here only make one trip up there per season. Same goes for Hawaii at the D1 (and D2, come to think of it) level. So that made last night all the more important.
I previously wrote of the GNAC as looking like a 2-bid league this year — us and UAA. Whoever get the automatic, whoever get the at-large. The GNAC doesn't typically get a great deal of at-large consideration. I've seen our league get three teams in the tournament a time or two, but there was one catastrophic year, 2008 I believe, where we only got our auto-qualifier in. All five West region at-large bids went to teams from the California Collegiate Athletic Association. The qualifier from the Pac-West Conference that year (Hawaii-Hilo if memory serves) got the 8-seed, the GNAC champ (Western Oregon that year) got the 7-seed, and CCAA teams got all the top six.
It was a steamroll, and it was especially gutting for us. We'd finished a solid second in the league that year, with our only two league losses to WOU themselves, and though it was obvious we'd be travelling, we didn't even think that we could miss the tournament altogether. And yet we did.
It was bewildering. It was painful. It was the premature end to some great careers. And it was completely unexpected.
Have a look at the current AVCA D-2 poll. Most of the West regional teams should be fairly plain to spot, but I'll point them out anyway. There's BYU-Hawaii, who are now almost assured of hosting regionals again, at #5. Us at #7 (and we'll probably be in double-digits in the next poll). UC San Diego at #10. Sonoma State, the only other team to beat us this season, at #11. And grand old Cal State-San Bernardino, at a lowly (for them) #14. Fresno Pacific at #23 and Point Loma Nazarene at #25 are also West region teams, playing in BYUH's Pac-West Conference.
Down in also receiving votes, we've got the Anchorage Seawolves along with another Pac-West team, Cal Baptist. There's a chance Anchorage will leap into the rankings this week. This is not an insignificant win they got last night.
And here comes that 2% of my brain again. Worst case scenario. It's thinking that unless we win the return match in Anchorage and either win the tiebreaker or have the Seawolves lay an egg some other night, we're gonna be left home in December. The signs are there. CCAA teams in the rankings. Even multiple Pac-West teams in the rankings. The year we missed out, the sixth-place CCAA team was, I believe, San Francisco State. I recall thinking that their resume was no better than ours — it certainly wasn't obviously better — and I had never really considered them being there at our expense. And so that 2% of my brain thinks again.
The 98% is telling me "We were single-digits in the rankings. We have, as impossible as it may sound, simultaneously one of the statistically best offences and defences in the nation. We're fine. We won't host, but we'll make regionals, even if we need an at-large."
That dog probably never bit anyone. But it still scares me when it barks.
The truth of the matter is that what happens between now and when the bracket is announced will play a deciding role. If we roll into that day with 2 conference losses or, god help us, 3, I really do think it's nailbiting time. Win the return match in Anchorage, and I'll feel a lot more confident.
My only question now is which side is rational. I can sit here now and know that dog down the street won't ever actually hurt me. But the 98/2 divide for the volleyball question, whether we're comfortably in or agonisingly out, I'm honestly not sure which side is which. I guess only time will tell.
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