Transcript: Sheffield previews NCAA Regional field
December 08, 2014 | Volleyball
Dec. 8, 2014-- Wisconsin volleyball head coach Kelly Sheffield met with the media in the Kohl Center Media Room on Monday to preview the NCAA Regional field. The Badgers face Ohio State on Friday in a 4 p.m. contest at the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky. The winner of the match goes onto the regional final to face the winner of Penn State/UCLA on Saturday in a 3 p.m. affair.
Archived video of the media session can be found above and a complete transcript of Sheffield's remarks can be found below.
UW Head Coach Kelly Sheffield: We are very fired up and fortunate to still be playing as of one of 16 teams. We don't take that for granted. There's a lot of really good programs around the country whose seasons have already ended.
So we're excited that we still get at least one more week. Three Big Ten teams here going to Louisville, and that's kind of interesting. Ohio State, we get an opportunity to play them for a third time. And a really, really talented team that looked awfully good against a seeded Kentucky team the other day.
So I thought they served and passed better than they have all year long. Offensively when they pass, they're a handful. And they looked awfully good after Game 1 was over. So we've had two days off, pretty much, and we're going to get back after it today and get two hard practices in before we take off on Wednesday and have a practice in Louisville on Thursday before we go Friday night.
QUESTION: The basketball teams have a conference tournament; the football team has a conference championship game. Were you ever a proponent of the Big Ten having a volleyball tournament before? And how does it feel, you say interesting, to have three Big Ten teams in one regional such as this?
SHEFFIELD: It's interesting. It's interesting that there's three Big Ten teams going to Louisville. And Minnesota, which is hosting a regional as well, doesn't have a single Big Ten team in the bracket.
Conference tournament, I think it would be exciting. I think it would be awesome for the fans. I think the players would be excited about playing. The question is what is the logistics? What does that look like? Does everybody get in? Is it football, just have two teams that do it? Is that what it looks like from us?
This is toward the end of the semester. So do you take a week to do it kind of like what basketball does? That's a little bit hard to do as well going right into the NCAA Tournament.
I think it will be exciting. What does it look like? Are we willing to cut down in our regular season to be able to do it? I know it's on the agenda for coaches to talk about. We're going to have a conference call here pretty soon to discuss it before we meet in person in January.
I know there's some people that are pretty passionate about it. What does it look like? Where is it? All those things.
But we're probably closer to heading down that road right now than what we were maybe a year or two ago.
QUESTION: Facing a team for the third time, is there an emotional edge one way or another, you've won both of them, do you expect to try and change up much, there's familiarity on both sides, how does that play out at this point in the season?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, you're familiar with your opponent. They're familiar with us. We've been on that side of things.
Last year we played two matches in the NCAA Tournament that it was our third time. One of them it was split one to one going into that third and the other one we lost the previous two and lost a third. There are no guarantees.
When you get into the tournament, you better be ready to play your best match. Our emphasis is that we're going to be trying to play our best volleyball of the year, regardless of who our opponent is.
You go back and you study the two matches that we played earlier, but the first time that we played, they looked very different than what they did then. One of their best players was just coming back from injury. The team that they played this past weekend looked different than the team we played a few weeks ago.
Ohio State just gives so much different challenges. They really keep you off balance with their serving game. They serve short maybe more than any team in the country. They change their lineups constantly going into matches. So it's really difficult preparing your team for. They'll move players around from left to middle to right. They made a couple of changes in that Kentucky match that I think caught Kentucky off guard a little bit and that's just one of the challenges they give.
At this point of the year, we're going to study our opponents and get going with a game plan, but I think so much of it is that you are at this point of the year, anybody will be able to beat you. You have to be prepared to play your best match of the year.
And you've got to be willing to look yourself in the mirror throughout this week and say all right, it's go time and I better be ready. Because you better believe your opponents are going to be ready.
QUESTION: It sounded casual, but when you talk about the fact there's three Big Ten teams where you are and there's none at the Minnesota region, one could sense a little annoyance in your voice. Is that a fair interpretation?
SHEFFIELD: The committee has way more information than what I do. I mean, who the heck am I? But it would seem to make sense, when you've got as many fans that go to Big Ten matches and predetermined regionals, that there would be at least one Big Ten team that was in the Big Ten regional or in a Big Ten site.
That would just seem like that would make sense, especially a sport that's trying to maximize our attendance numbers in the NCAA Tournament. That seems to be a focus of our sport and of our committee. That's something that they could have ensured. Nebraska is not too far away. Wisconsin is not too far away.
That just would have seemed like it could have made sense. On the other hand, does that mess with the integrity of the bracket? That's possible, you don't want to do that.
Would I have loved to have been going to Minnesota so our fans could have hung with us a little bit more and made that easier of a drive for them? Absolutely. Am I annoyed? I don't know. They've got a difficult job. And we're going to focus on Ohio State.
QUESTION: It was a long time ago when you played Penn State here, all the hype in the match and lost that match here. How different, better, improved would you say has your team changed since that meeting?
SHEFFIELD: You mean the butt kicking? That's what you mean. You can say that. I hope we're different. I hope we're better. We've got bad coaching if we're not better.
I think they're better as well when I watch them watching them go through their season. They've got different personnel. The Big Ten Freshman of the Year didn't even play in that match. She hadn't even played in that season I don't think up to that point. So I think they're dramatically different.
We've fixed some things on our end and hopefully we approach a match, the game a lot better.
If we're fortunate enough to play them, they're going to give us a whole lot of handful of issues. UCLA has probably got the most dominating attacker in college volleyball right now and it will give us a lot of issues as well.
But to answer your question, are we better than what we were, statistically it will say that we're a better team right now than we were the first part of the season.
I think we understand our identity a little bit better than what we did at that point. Even though we only graduated one player, I think we were still trying to figure out who we were this first couple of months of the year.
I think we have a little bit better understanding of what we are and what we're not. If we get another opportunity to play in the Elite Eight, whoever we're against, we're going to be pretty darned excited about it.
QUESTION: You showed last year that experience wasn't a requirement to have success in the tournament. Now that you have that experience with you, what do you carry from that going forward and how does that help you?
SHEFFIELD: I didn't have much experience last year so I answered it that way. Now I've got a lot more experience, so it's way better for our program. I don't know.
I think coaches, you go one way or the other. You're either a doomsday pessimist and everything is a challenge and a hurdle and you can't be happy with anything, or you go the other way and you sit there and you say, hey, this is an opportunity, whatever it is.
That tends to be the way that I kind of look at it. So there were some things that we went about last year that how we were, I thought it helped. Now being here, I think there's some other things and how we go about things, I think it helps.
I think the main thing is whether you're young or old or experienced or not experienced or short or tall or whatever is does your team believe that they're good. And do they believe that they can do things together and are they still excited about the season.
The majority of teams, my belief in any sport, get halfway through the season most teams are already circling the days off on the calendar. It's sad but it's true. It's hard being a student athlete. It's hard being committed. It's hard making the sacrifices when the general student population isn't being forced to do that.
You're waking up and going to the weight room and everybody else is heading home, they look like they're having fun, disheveled but fun. And it's hard to make all those types of commitments all the time. You get halfway through the grind and it's tough.
But when you have a team that you're fortunate where your leaders are still leading, everybody's still buying in, they're still dreaming and still playing for things that are bigger than themselves, it's kind of cool. So to me that's way more important than what the experience level is.
