The 2025 Stephen F. Austin volleyball season has had its
fair share of roller coaster emotions regarding just how far our club could take
their talents. I’ll admit it: There were
times this season where I could see us here in the NCAA Tournament. There were
times when I wasn’t even thinking of it as a realistic possibility. But one
aspect of Ladyjack Volleyball that was on display both early and late in the Fall
(only now has it turned to winter in East Texas) has been the ‘Jacks
performance at the service stripe.
One of the best wins of the season came early against now RPI #45 Texas State. When I got back to Nacogdoches after that trip to San Antonio, folks asked me my first impressions of live game action and what it was that propelled us to a key win over the Bobcats. The response was easy: We served them off the floor. Indeed, in Match #2 of the year SFA posted 14 aces – what would go on to be a season high – in a dominant display of controlling an entire match by first contact. It didn’t stop there as SFA tallied 11 match aces in a four-set loss against Bowling Green and then a few weeks later tallied 11 more in a four-set win down in Corpus Christi. Southeastern Louisiana came to town and got 11 aces thrown down on them in just three sets in a commanding midseason win over a team that had given SFA trouble in recent years. In the last two rounds of the Southland Conference Tournament, SFA posted an average of two aces per set in victories over UIW and UTRGV.
All told, SFA’s first ace against TCU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament will be their 200th of the season. SFA fans know about #InLikeFlynn by now. The hashtag that I created off the cuff in Jayden Flynn’s inaugural season went on to spawn fashion wear bearing the phrase. Flynn comes into the NCAA Tournament sixth all time at SFA in career aces with 159, with 26 of those coming this season. One of the big additions to the ‘Jacks serving core though is sophomore Katherine Holtman. Placed into the teams serving rotation midway through last season, Kat already has 50 career aces and leads the team this year with 38. Many of those coming from her laser beam serve that scorches the top of the tape as it heads straight for the end line causing confusion for oncoming passers. Second setter Zoe Gun finished third in the Southland Conference in aces per set and has found the floor 33 times on her serves this season. Libero Caroline Kahle has posted a career best 28 aces and the ever-steady Cam Hill has posted her third straight season of 20+ service winners. That’s five of the ‘Jacks typical six servers as we don’t tend to sub in a serving specialist except in well… really specially special specialist situations. When you consider that the final server in the typical rotation is the outside hitter opposite Hill and that’s been either Kennedy Jones or Illana DeAssis – who have 30 aces between them – you can see why the SFA total ace tally is so high.
It's one thing to amass 199 service aces in a season – a total that is currently 39th best in the NCAA Division 1 ranks. It’s a compete OTHER THING to not get aced by your opponents. In many ways, SFA has excelled in not getting aced more so than actually tallying aces themselves. In fact, the Ladyjacks are 11th in the country in “Opponent Aces” having allowed only a stingy 97 aces in 108 sets. The math is easy (you knew there would be math): SFA averages 1.84 aces per set while allowing only 0.90 aces per set from their opponents. That’s nearly a full point (1.84 – 0.90 = 0.94 points) per set just on the differential between team aces and opponent aces.
Early in the season, I began to notice the gap between our team aces and opponent aces growing. So, as always, research began. Thanks to the statistical work over at evollve.net, I was able back in October to create the first edition of what I’ve been calling “Ace Differential” or just “Ace Diff” for short, only because it sounds cool. Ace Diff is a simple stat. There is nothing complicated about it, but I guess that’s the point. Volleyball has some pretty elementary categories for statistics: kills, attacks, blocks, digs, errors – they are all easy to define and keep track of. So, Ace Diff fits right in. Ace Diff is just Team Aces – Opponent Aces.
Now, here’s the thing: No one keeps track of it. Like, officially.. in print and stuff.
After creating the Ace Diff leaderboard one night late in a hotel lobby while on the road in Louisiana I thought to myself – well, surely I can go out to the NCAA website and confirm my work because this a really simple stat and I’ve just duplicated something that is being tracked from a national source and I can check my list. Nope. Not there. Then, I went back to evollve and started playing around with all of its features for sorting and editing volleyball numbers. Surely it was just called something else like Aces Margin or Net Aces or something and I’d find it and could verify that I had made the leaderboard correctly. Nope. Nothing.
So, after more internet searching and not finding anyone that catalogued this simple metric I did what I do every week during volleyball season and began texting SFA Volleyball sports information director Amanda Paver frantically saying “hey, you ever seen this thing ‘ace diff’ anywhere”? From that moment on, we’ve been tracking it and I’m proud to tell you that
SFA is 6th in the Country in Ace Differential
Going into the NCAA Tournament, here is the (National Debut of?) Division 1 Leaderboard For Ace Differential:
1. Creighton +143 (Holy Crap!)
2. UConn +117
3. Miami (FL) +116
4. Stanford +111
5. Toledo +105
6. SFA +102
7. Pepperdine (+98)
8. St. Thomas (MN) +89
9. Howard +86
10. American +82
What is interesting about that list, other than SFA being so darn high on it, is that seven of the 10 teams on that leaderboard are in the NCAA Tournament. Plus, Pepperdine just missed an at-large bid. In addition, UConn RPI’s in the Top 75, so Howard, who plays in the very volleyball weak MEAC, is really the only outlier. Clearly, there is some measure of relationship, as you’d expect, among Ace Differential and overall team quality.
Now, sure, let’s acknowledge
the obvious, strength of schedule is a lurking variable here, but not as much
as you might think. Again, Howard is the only outlier as they are the only team
on that list with a strength of schedule in the lower half of all Division 1 programs. The overall median strength of schedule for those Top 10 Ace Diff teams
clocks in at 92. For perspective, there are 348 D1 Volleyball programs. And
for those interested, SFA’s strength of schedule rating is currently 122nd
(SOSPct Rank, Figstats) That mark is affected greatly by the bottom half of the
Southland Conference, but we aren’t here to discuss that today.
So, what then? The issue here is that we’ve told the same story in another way that you’ve heard many times before. Serving is the great equalizer. The service line doesn’t know the difference between a power 4 team from the Big 12 or SEC or a team from a mid-major conference like the Southland or the Colonial. Serving can neutralize a team’s physical differences, even its potential athleticism. We’ve all heard it a million times: the name of the game is first contact – serve and serve receive.
Well, if you are sixth in the country in Ace Diff, 11th in the nation in opponent aces and 39th in the nation in team service aces, then you are good at first contact. Bottom line (or, close to it): If SFA executes serve and serve receive at an incredibly high level then we might just give a Power 4 school some measure of trouble.
So, will we?
Let’s see. Keep your eyes on the service line. The difference between a ‘Jacks first round win – which would be our first since 2006 – and a tournament loss at the hands of another Power 4 school, may very well be Ace Diff.