Another three games, another match, another loss.
It’s an all-too-familiar story for the Oregon volleyball team, one that I seemed to echo in nearly all of my stories when I covered the team a year ago.
With the exception of a single win toward the end of last season — which, by the way, came against a suddenly shorthanded Oregon State team — each match, game and moment was the same. The Ducks would start off hot on good nights, but generally cooled down fast. Once the wheels turned off, they never came back on.
Oregon lost 16 matches in a row last season, including a stretch of seven straight sweeps. That’s 21 games without a single win.
The losses blurred together after a while. Then-head coach Cathy Nelson would call for a time-out to save the Ducks from getting buried, and she would confer with her assistant coaches away from the bench while the players tried to keep hopes alive. Then she would go back to them, talk strategy and the players would walk back on the court to play — and get pounded.
The scene after those lost matches changed slightly as the season went on. Everyone, players and coaches, seemed more and more desperate. Repeatedly, Nelson said she didn’t think about the losing streaks. On a couple occasions, red, puffy eyes betrayed the coach.
I remember sitting on press row in Corvallis, watching the Ducks lose the first Civil War match to the Beavers. You would never know they were losing from the way they were joking around with each other, despite the scoreboard.
A reporter sitting near me said something about KidSports. Point well taken.
So there I sat on Friday, hoping to see a dramatic turnaround. I knew the Ducks’ season results almost mirrored those of last season. I watched Oregon fight for a 2-0 lead over Oregon State on Sept. 19, only to have the wheels fall off again and lose in five games.
I tried telling myself as I watched them play Friday that they commit fewer errors this season than they did last season. But the weekend’s results showed 20 attack errors against Arizona State and 22 against Arizona, just a couple down from the averages of a year ago.
Is there anything different about this team? Anything positive at all?
Yes, there is.
No more light-heartedness. The Ducks have discipline. They respect themselves, even when they are down. For the first time in a long time, Oregon has an attitude.
While this newfound attitude hasn’t won the Ducks many matches, it has made them tough. After a successful preseason, they took Stanford and California to five games each. Oregon also beat Portland, which it failed to do at home last October when the Pilots hadn’t won a single game.
The difference between last season and this season eludes the scorecards, but can be seen on setter Sydney Chute’s face as she gives direction to her teammates between volleys.
And the origin of this potentially program-saving improvement stands calmly on the sideline during the matches, clad in a business suit and clutching a clipboard.
A new head coach can only do so much with a new team, let alone a team that spent the last nine years in the Pacific-10 Conference cellar. But Carl Ferreira has done all he can under that situation, giving his team a more sturdy foundation than anything it had last time around.
It is impossible to ask Ferreira to transform these Ducks into one of the best teams of the conference so soon — it’s another thing entirely for them to become one of the hardest-working teams around.
Last season, Nelson said it was hard to go on without the rewards of winning.
I see a single positive change: Somehow, Ferreira has found a way to do just that.