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.
