Volleyball Time (& football, & basketball, &...)

The Fall Championship Swing continues...

Here are the fall results so far:

Men's Cross Country: Liberty
Women's Cross Country: Liberty
Women's Soccer: High Point
Men's Soccer: Winthrop

And we have two pending results that will be solved by sometime Saturday afternoon...

Volleyball--now in the Conference Championship at Radford, with eight teams starting quarterfinal Thursday, then four surviving to play semifinal Friday, and finally two still standing on Saturday to go after the title in the last match. At this writing, the first quarterfinal has been played...regular season co-champion and #2 seed Liberty advanced 3-0, eliminating GWU. The top seed is UNC Asheville--and the Bulldogs have to face the host team in the fourth match of the day on RU's floor. The final begins at 2pm Saturday.

Football--something unexpected happened on the road to the virtual "Big South Championship Game": Stony Brook lost. For weeks, the 11/21 LU-SBU game had been circled by many as a likely meeting between undefeated clubs shooting for an outright championship in a head-to-head battle. Well, that's partly right. With Charleston Southern pulling off the upset over SBU in overtime last weekend, SBU enters at 4-1 in the Big South, while Liberty held serve and went over the 50-point threshold again (against GWU this time) to reach 5-0. So now, the Flames are assured at least a share of the title--win this week and it's all theirs...while the Seawolves are working for a claim on half of the honor (the championship is based only on record, not on any tiebreakers). And while that's the battle for the top, there's an interesting "tipping point" match between Charleston Southern and Coastal Carolina this weekend: both are 5-5, so the winner has a winning record, loser has a losing record, and that's what they'll have to reflect on until next season.

Oh, and yes, basketball is bursting out all over.

Some nice victories for the men's teams on opening night, with Radford downing Navy, VMI stopping Army, and Coastal Carolina defeating the College of Charleston (a SoCon favorite this year)...but things took an unfortunate turn in recent days--and on TV, no less--with Liberty (vs. Clemson), Coastal Carolina (at Duke), and UNC Asheville (at Tennessee) all taking pretty bad beatings at the hands of major programs in front of large audiences. But it's verrrrrrry early, so we won't draw too many conclusions beyond the obvious and understood fact that, in general, the ACC and SEC programs are going to be much better on the floor most nights...that said, we can still hope for some more of those signature upsets our Conference seems to sneak in each season.

So with the last of the fall sports at the finish and the thrill of hoops still getting bigger, let's see what the Big South Network has going on this week (from our pre-Thanksgiving turkey: me)......word of warning--feeling under the weather this week, so it's not my best work, but even with a weak voice and less energy, the message comes through...I hope...

That's all for now, peeps and tweeps, friends and fans--keep rockin' in the Big South!

SHOUT, out...