• At 6-0 the Lady Vols are off to their best start since 2004. It’s the 5th best start in Tennessee history.

• Tennessee’s 6 consecutive sweeps ties the school record for the most straight set wins in a row. And until this year the team had never started a season with more than 5 sweeps in a row.

• The Lady Vols have beaten at least one ranked opponent in 6 of the last 7 seasons. They move to 18-22 against the Top 25 in that time frame. In the 21 years prior to that, Tennessee only defeated 3 ranked foes. They’ve won 3 of their last 4 matches vs ranked teams.

• Tennessee had 55 kills vs Oklahoma. Since 2007, that’s the 3rd highest total in a three set match.

• Nikki Fowler became the first player at UT in 16 years to reach 1,000 kills and 1,000 digs in a career. She joins Kristy Dobson, Stephanie Ehlers, and Sonja Thomas in reaching that mark.

• In last week’s recap I pointed out that Tennessee had held about half their opponents over the past two seasons (and all three to that point this season) to under a .160 hitting percentage. The Lady Vols continue their defensive domination this week, again holding all three opponents under .160.

• With the win over Oklahoma, members of the 2010 squad have now defeated teams representing 17 conferences since 2006 (when senior Leah Hinkey was a freshman; not counting the SEC; including independents). With the win over Houston, they got their 35th out of conference victory. The team is 35-15 OOC in that time.

I didn’t list the following items in the last recap so these include numbers for the past two weeks.

Record updates:

Double doubles:

Career highs matched or exceeded (excluding freshmen):

UPDATE: Nikki Fowler took the MVP award, while Leslie Cikra and Kelsey Robinson make the All-Tournament team.

UPDATE: Box score is out and player stats are updated — so much nicer than before! Fowler is just 4 away from the 1,000 digs club. She only had 3 errors on 45 attacks, which is the lowest she’s had on that many swings since her freshman year. Hinkey has hit over .450 in 3 out of 4 matches this year. UT keeps up the pressure defensively, holding OU to .111 hitting while going .345 themselves.

• The Lady Vols have not seen much of Oklahoma and Florida State over the years. While the Seminoles were a regular foe at one time, the teams have not faced off since 1989. We’ve seen the Sooners more recently, but much less often. The only times the teams have met were in 1981 and 1997.

• Tennessee faces their first ranked opponent of the season: #13 Florida State. Over the last six seasons, the Lady Vols are a respectable 17-22 against the Top 25.

• As the Lady Vols are the #17 team in the country, our competition will be playing a ranked team too. Oklahoma has never beaten a ranked team at a neutral site. Houston has not beaten a ranked team since 2003.

• We may be playing non-conference teams this weekend, but our opponents are well versed in SEC volleyball:

Florida State head coach Chris Pool was the Arkansas head coach from 1994-2007, and led them to 11 SEC Western Division titles and the 1997 SEC Tournament Championship. Both his assistants served under him at Arkansas as well.

First year Houston head coach Molly Alvey served the last five seasons as assistant and associate head coach as Mississippi. The team went to their first two NCAA Tournaments during her time there. Her assistant coach, Nicole Miller, was a graduate assistant at Mississippi and a former player at South Carolina.

Oklahoma head Coach Santiago Restrepo didn’t work in the SEC, but as a former head coach at Southern Miss he undoubtedly recruited against them. His assistant coach Sam Ojie was also a southeastern guy, having coached at Tulane and Central Florida before serving at Georgia in 2006.

•  13 players for OU, FSU, and UH are from outside the United States.

•  Some might think Houston is the underdog among the teams in this tournament. In fact, they actually hold the advantage against all three. They are 9-5 all time vs Florida State, 7-2 vs Oklahoma, and 6-3 over Tennessee.

• While the Lady Vols did not win during their last visit to the state of Texas, you can’t say it was a bad experience. The team lost to Washington 3-0 in the 2005 Final Four in San Antonio. Tennessee was just the fifth school in the Eastern Time Zone to have played in a National Semifinals.

• The Texas natives on the UT(K) roster might see some familiar names across the court tonight. Plano West alum Nikki Fowler will be facing a former high school cross town rival. Oklahoma’s Chrissy Disarro was also a member of the class of 2006, but at Plano East. Former Texas Advantage Volleyball Club member Kelsey Mahoney will go up against clubmate Francie Ekwerekwu.

• Hopefully Smokey can handle this: Tennessee’s schedule is cat-heavy this season! They’ll start off the 10-match feline portion of their schedule this weekend against the Cougars. Next week will feature all an all-cat lineup of opponents as the team will face the Wildcats, Bobcats, and Panthers. Then comes the SEC schedule where we’ll play another Wildcats team and two Tiger teams.

•  Tennessee is 30-8 in season opening matches and 27-5 in home opening matches. They’ve won 9 straight home openers. The Lady Vols have never lost a match at home in August. They’ve now started the season with 3 wins in a row 13 times in school history, and 3 seasons in a row.

• The Lady Vols have a reputation for suffocating offenses recently, and that tradition continues. Chattanooga’s .032 hitting percentage was the second lowest by a Tennessee opponent in the past year, and the the seventh lowest over the past two years. All three teams this weekend were held under .160 — a feat Tennessee’s defense has accomplished 33 times over the 67 matches since 2008.

• With 1,307 on hand, the Virginia Tech match was the fifth highest attended home match in Lady Vol history, and the largest ever for a non-conference home game.

• With 10 kills but just 9 digs versus Virginia Tech, Nikki Fowler’s impressive double-double streak ends at 18 matches in a row. Dating back to the Auburn match last October, Fowler had 297 kills and 239 digs. Over those matches she averaged 4.37 kills per set and 3.51 digs per set. 5 of the 18 matches were against Top 25 teams. Since 2001, the most consecutive double-doubles after Fowler’s streak is 7.

• With all the behind-the-scenes work I did this week, I haven’t had time to do the career high updates yet. I’ll start recapping those next week.

Kalyn Helton is a 6’1″ outside hitter at Red Bank High School in Chattanooga TN. In 2008, her team was third in the state before finishing the job last year and winning the state championship. Helton was named All-City, – Region, and -State. She led the Chattanooga area in kills with 778, and also had 560 digs, 154 aces, and 34 blocks. Helton plays club at Choo Choo City (where current Lady Vol Jasmine Brown is an alumna). At the recent AAU Girls’ Junior National Volleyball Championship her team went 7-3, coming in 44th out of 133 teams in the 17 Club division. On choosing Tennessee Helton said, “What I really liked was the coaches and players. Everybody is really friendly, very believable. I just liked the fact it’s the highest level of volleyball there is. They’re picked to finish first in the SEC this year. I really liked their academics, too, and what they had to offer me there. And it’s only about an hour and a half away from home”. Her mother, who is also her high school coach and the 2009 state AA coach of the year, said “As her coach, I know she’s very talented, but I’ve also watched her work and improve. The Tennessee coaches asked me what I thought was her strength, and I told them it’s her discipline and work ethic. She’s determined to get better, and always has been… As a parent, to have been able to watch her accomplish all those things, I really can’t describe it. I’m just so proud of her, and trying to sit back and take it all in with her.”

• The official site has a video interview with Coach Patrick discussing the past weekend and looking ahead to this upcoming one.

• PrepVolleyball is counting down their annual Senior Aces this week. Congratulations to Tennessee commitment Shealyn Kolosky who makes the list at #83. Last season all four UT recruits made the list (three in the top 100), giving Tennessee the 4th ranked class in the nation. We’ll have to await the full list to see how the team did this year. Until then, we’ve already talked up several future Lady Vols the past few months. You can catch up on those here, here, and here. And there are still a couple of 2011 commitments left to discuss! I’ll be getting to them as soon as possible.

• Tennessee has moved up in the polls. We’re up two spots to #17 in the AVCA poll, three spots to #18 in the RichKern.com poll, and move from unranked to #16 in the Volleyball Magazine poll.

• And finally a quick update on what’s going on around here! If you’re interested in the tech part of the site, read on:

I’ve spent this week totally rewriting the way I handle the player stats. Before, I kept track of them in a spreadsheet and then would spend a few hours on Sunday night manually entering them all into the website! If you’ve ever talked to me at a game and wondered how I could pull stats out of nowhere the answer is through tedious typing! After hours of that every weekend the numbers get stuck in your brain!

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a numbers guy, as you can probably tell! In high school, as manager of the girls team part of my job was to compile the stats during the game. And back then that was done as fast as you could while watching the match with pencil and paper! So I’m not complaining about getting to enjoy the game then downloading the box score created by someone else and copying and pasting it into a spreadsheet. But I’m also a computer geek, so the idea of finding a better way was intriguing to me on two fronts.

That’s why I haven’t got a weekend match recap out yet. But the stats update is finally done! The new way I update the main stats will probably take about three minutes! And I can do it as soon as the box score is released after a match rather than waiting until the end of the weekend. Also, this new system will allow me to eventually create some new ways for you to view and interact with the stats. I’ll still have to do the player career highs list manually for now, but that doesn’t usually take too long. The down side is I probably won’t be able to quote you Leslie Cikra’s total number of kills off the top of my head anymore! But less time doing tedious work on this site means more time I can do other things… like get match recaps out on time!