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2025 PSU WVB Thread
- Thread starter Tom McAndrew
- Start date
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I agree with what everyone is saying. Lots of mistakes, quality opponents, still trying to reload and find their groove. The other thing I wanted to mention is what is going on with the constant floaters on the serves that seem to always go out and then when receiving, they think is out but it drops like 3 feet in? Putting some of the freshman in seemed to give them a spark at times. They have a long way to go and if I remember correctly, they started off somewhat sloppy last season as well.
Good float serves can be really tricky to handle because they can move a lot and unpredictably so. This doesn't really show on TV, you need to sit behind the end line to really see the movement. They are far harder to pass than a top spin jump serve, unless you have a damn good jumper with a lot of velocity like Micha Hancock, who also had the benefit of being a lefty so her serve tailed to the opposite side that passers are used to. As a player, I hate being in serve receive against a good float server, give me a topspin jumper any day. The PSU servers are just putting too much power on it, or not serving from behind the end line far enough, if they are consistently hitting theirs out. It can vary from gym to gym too, ventilation systems and airflow on the court can also have an impact.
Something else I noticed was in Pittsburgh the games may have been played with a Tachikara soft touch ball, although I'm not positive as it's hard to spot the model # on TV. I thought that was unusual, it's not a common game ball from what I've seen but I don't always look for this. It seems in college different teams, conferences, tournaments can use different balls and there isn't one standard. I don't know any competitve players that prefer Tachikara balls anymore, and that soft touch one is less preferred than their leather Gold model with less padding which is a good ball but wears out quickly. I haven't seen player's prefer a Tachikara ball where I play in well over a decade and in general players don't seem to like the balls with extra padding like the soft touch has. For my leagues, the Molten Flistatec is by far the current preference, and if you bring something different odds are people won't even touch it. That Molten ball has an NCAA cert and the men use it, but I don't think many women's teams do. It's possible PSU wasn't used to the softer ball vs. their home ball (Nike or Baden IIRC), although at this level I'd imagine the coaches know ahead of time which balls are going to be used and practice with them leading up to the match. It's not something that should be so impactful as to change a match result, but it absolutely can mess with the expected trajectory of a float serve.
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