Greatest Volleyball Team Ever?

As soon as I finished my class on Thursday morning (okay, as soon as I finished my IPR presentation dry run just after noon on Thursday), my brain definitely went “on break.” Even with the IPR yet to come, I have no more academic responsibilities this semester, so I’m practically on Christmas break already. At least mentally. 🙂
In addition to being the end of my seventh semester of grad school, this week was the end of an era for the PSU Department of Meteorology — Jeff Frame packed up and moved away. He’s been a grad student in the department since Fall 2001, so he’s pretty much been an institution here. But he finished his Ph.D. and got a job at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, so it was time for him to move, which he did on Saturday morning. So on Friday afternoon I helped Mario, Kent, Petters & Bob to load up Jeff’s moving truck. And I just have to say kudos to Jeff for making that one of the easiest, smoothest moves that I’ve ever helped with. Everything was all boxed up, and it only took 45 minutes to load up the truck! Hooray for easy moves. In the evening a bunch of us went out to G-Man for team trivia. And appropriately for Jeff’s final trivia as a State College resident, Trivia Steve was there to emcee, so that was really cool. He’s definitely our favorite trivia guy, of the ones that have done team trivia here in State College over the years. And we also made sure to send Jeff out on the right foot by winning first place, scoring just 3 points short of the maximum, and by going “all in” on the final question. It won’t be the same without Jeff at trivia from now on, but somehow we’ll manage to continue the meteo team trivia tradition.
This afternoon I went into campus to go to the NCAA women’s volleyball tournament Elite Eight matchup between nationally #1-ranked Penn State and #8-ranked California. As a little bit of background, Penn State won national championships last academic year in both women’s and men’s volleyball, so in addition to being a football school, I guess you could say we’re now a volleyball school too. Anyway, the women’s volleyball team has simply been demolishing opponents all year long. Not only did they win all 30 matches they played in the regular season this year, they also didn’t lose even a single set in the regular season(!!). I’ll let that sink in for a minute… That trend has continued in the NCAA tournament so far, and in the Sweet Sixteen matchup yesterday with Western Michigan, Penn State broke the NCAA record for consecutive sets won, at 106 (Florida held the old record at 105 in the 2003 season). That’s right, dating back to the fifth and deciding set of last year’s national championship victory over Stanford, the Nittany Lions have won every single set they’ve played. There is talk about this year’s Penn State team potentially being the greatest college women’s volleyball team ever.
So today when Penn State fell into a deep hole early in the first set vs Cal, their consecutive sets streak looked to be in serious jeopardy. The Golden Bears led by scores of 7-1, 13-6 and 19-13 in the first set, before the Nittany Lions stormed back to take the set 25-21, the furious rally igniting the raucous crowd of over 4,000 in Rec Hall. PSU would never trail in a set again the rest of the afternoon. Like in the first set, they were still a bit shaky and error-prone in the second set, but prevailed 25-21 heading into intermission. In the third set the Nittany Lions turned up the quality of their play a notch, and dispatched of California 25-17 to close out the match in straight sets! Not only is Penn State’s consecutive-sets streak now at 109, but they’ve earned a berth in the Final Four next weekend in Omaha, where they will attempt to win a second consecutive national championship! Let’s Go State!! Even with all the errors, it was a pretty exciting match, especially with the big rally in the first set. I’m definitely glad I went, even though I wound up going alone. Though I did end up running into Dr Nese, so he sat and watched the first two sets with me before he had to go. It was good chatting with him again.
I took videos at the end of all three sets, but here’s the end of the third set, which I’ve posted to YouTube. For some reason it doesn’t seem like the quality of this video is as good as other videos I’ve posted to YouTube from my camera, oh well. The actual file is very high quality. Enjoy!

Penn State defeats California in the Elite Eight of the 2008 NCAA Women’s Volleyball Tournament
And tomorrow evening we have our PSCG Christmas party, complete with a white-elephant gift exchange! Who will be the lucky person to get what I’m wrapping up? Hehehe, we shall see! 🙂