Sonja Newcombe flashed a smile through the bright lights of Sunday afternoon’s press conference.
The freshman outside hitter joined the Oregon volleyball team expecting to make an improvement. She had no idea the Ducks would make the NCAA Tournament.
“I was expecting to come in and change things, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high,” said Newcombe, who came to Eugene from Lake Arrowhead, Calif. “I just wanted to go with the season and see how far we could get.”
Sunday, the Oregon volleyball earned one of seven NCAA Tournament bids awarded to the Pacific-10 Conference. Oregon travels to Long Beach, Calif. Friday for a first-round match-up with No. 12 Hawaii.
Hawaii (26-5) earned an automatic bid by winning the Western Athletic Conference Tournament in Reno, Nev. In an interesting twist, Hawaii’s roster includes senior Sarah Mason, who transferred from Oregon in the spring of 2005 after two years with the program.
The last two weeks, Oregon went through a difficult stretch with four matches against four top-15 programs. Overall, Oregon has lost seven consecutive matches to go from a 17-4 record to a current record of 17-11.
Oregon coach Jim Moore said he saw positive signs in Oregon’s most recent losses, Friday at USC and Saturday at UCLA.
“If we attack the ball the way we played (Saturday) and we play the defense we played all year long, I think we’re a difficult team to deal with,” Moore said. “We block pretty well. We serve tough and we pass well.”
Kristen Bitter joins fellow seniors Heather Madison and Erin Little in continuing their first winning season of their Oregon careers, including two years under Carl Ferreira and two years under Jim Moore.
“This is huge,” Bitter said. “We’ve been saying since day one this is a new era of Oregon volleyball and I think this is just another step in that process.”
The NCAA Tournament is single elimination – anything can happen. There are upsets of top seeds. Teams find momentum and make long runs through the tournament.
“It’s a clean slate,” Bitter said. “We talked about there being three seasons – preseason, regular season and postseason and we’re in the third season. We made it here. Everybody is 0-0. ‘No expectations, no limitations’ has always been our motto. This is no different.”
Two years ago, Senior Associate Athletic Director Renee Baumgartner and Athletic Director Bill Moos played parts in the hiring of Moore. Including this season, Moore has enjoyed successful stints at Northern Michigan University (twice), Kansas State University, the University of Texas-Austin, Chico State and now Oregon.
“He’s the turnaround master,” Baumgartner said. “He just gets it done. It’s incredible the programs that he has turned around.”
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