Record crowd sees Pitt lose 1st
PSU comes back 2 days later for win
When he first arrived at Pitt as the school’s women’s volleyball coach in 2013, Dan Fisher didn’t have scenes like the one surrounding him and his players Sunday in mind.
His goals, at that time, were more realistic. He was taking over a program that was mired in mediocrity, with a 48-47 record in the three years before his hiring. He wanted to dream, but in that moment, he didn’t have that luxury. More manageable benchmarks awaited. Chasing Penn State and its, at the time, five national titles? That wasn’t one of them.
“I probably would phrase it this way — we were, I think, 120th in the RPI when I took the job and they were No. 1,” Fisher said. “We weren’t looking at how we could be No. 1. We were looking at how we could get a little better of a recruit. We were looking at the next step.”
Sunday, as he and the Panthers took to the court at Petersen Events Center, what greeted them was something out of one of his more grandiose visions. A program-record 5,195 fans were in the stands. A top-five opponent representing one of the sport’s most accomplished programs, a foe they swept on the road two nights earlier, stood on the other side of the net. Even for a program that itself sports a top-10 ranking, the setting for Pitt’s eventual five-set loss Sunday against Penn State bordered at times on surreal.
Penn State won the first, third and deciding sets, 28-26, 25-21 and 16-14. Pitt’s set wins were 25-21, 25-20.
For those programs, however, it’s an exalted status they’ve both reached, albeit in their own ways. Only one state has multiple volleyball programs ranked in the top 10 of the most recent AVCA coaches’ poll, and over the weekend, Friday night in University Park and Sunday afternoon in Oakland, that designation received the proper settings complete with the proper fanfare.
As much as the end of the football series between Pitt and Penn State, whether temporary or not, was mourned over the past several weeks, much of what people romanticized about the rivalry at its apex in the 1970s and 1980s is still present now, just in a different, more-likely-to-beoverlooked sport.
The Panthers and Nittany Lions — ranked No. 6 and No. 4, respectively, in the most recent poll — are among the best in college volleyball. Their five-set thriller Sunday reaffirmed as much. Additionally, it has elements of a great rivalry beyond just geographic proximity, namely that the upstart program from the city school now is challenging and, as Friday showed, occasionally besting a towering counterpart that, even several years ago, may have appeared untouchable.
Penn State, led by 41styear coach Russ Rose, is volleyball royalty, with seven championships to its name, six of which have been won in the past 12 years. Even as Pitt improved under Fisher, Penn State remained a barrier, much more of a white whale than a group of Nittany Lions. The Panthers’ seasons in 2016 and 2017 were ended by Penn State in the NCAA tournament, both in University Park and both in four sets. Pitt had come a far way, but its intrastate foe showed just how much further it had to go.
That imbalance has started to tilt. On Friday, Pitt (11-1) dominated the Nittany Lions (7-2), winning all three sets to snap a 16-match losing streak to them that dated to 1987, about a decade before its oldest players were born. For Penn State, it was the first time it had been swept in a non-conference home match since 1986.
Before Pitt’s victory Friday, it had sold 3,200 tickets, which already was a program record. Not even 48 hours later, that number ballooned by more than 60 percent.
“Somebody made a question on Friday saying ‘Hey, Pitt’s really good. Did they just get really good?’ I was like ‘They’ve been really good over the course of 40 years a number of times,’” Rose said. “Let’s not pass it off like they’re just good now. They’ve been good before, but they’re really good now.”
Tournaments heavily populate volleyball teams’ nonconference schedules, but this year, Pitt and Penn State had an open weekend. Fisher said he would love for regular-season matchups between the two to be more of a regular occurrence.
“I think it’s great for the state,” Fisher said. “I’ve been trying to schedule them for a while. I’m glad it worked out this year.”