It’s the last day of 2008, which was a great year for Lady Vols Volleyball! I hope everyone had a great Christmas! Just a quick heads up on updates now that the holidays are almost over. I’m off to Memphis for the Liberty Bowl (Go Pirates!), but when I get back this weekend I should have a final look at how the Lady Vols stand nationally and in the conference done and ready to be posted. Then in the next week I hope to have a season recap written up. After that things will go quiet except for any occasional news that may come up. Until then, Happy New Year!

I’m re-working the way I post stats on the Roster page to make them more… informational? Is that a real word? Anyway, you can check out Nikki Fowler’s career stats to see what I’m talking about. I’m using her as the guinea pig for testing since she has a good amount of stats in every category and she only has two seasons worth of data to sift through. If you have any other ideas or suggestions for stats I should add feel free to let me know.

Apologies for my continued absence! I had hoped to be free of the bulk of work that my other website takes by now. But I’m still swamped! I hope to catch up with everything, including this site, during the weekend.

Just a heads up that I won’t be posting the weekly recap or upcoming notes until probably Thursday. I run another website about presidential elections. That site takes all my free time during the run up to election day. By the time it’s all done though I’ll be so burned out on politics that I’ll be longing to spend time back here! See you in a few days!

After three days of cold medicine induced grogginess, I’m finally feeling pretty good — except for my voice which is only half there! So it’s time to get caught up. I’m going to pass on the weekend recap, update the stats page, and get to work on the notes for this weekend. Hopefully all should be done by tomorrow.

Well I am obviously not on my way to Starkville right now as planned! I woke up this morning with a pretty bad cold. I am going to take some Nyquil and crash so there may not be any updates after todays match. I think the MSU website will have live score and stats.

After giving it some thought I have decided to continue the site. In the middle of last week I got curious about how close Chloe Goldman was getting to making the Tennessee top ten career digs list so I went ahead and compiled the stats that I had skipped out on doing earlier. It made me realize I was probably going to do that kind of thing with or without the blog so I might as well share it on a website so it makes me seem like a little bit less of a volleyball geek for doing it for no reason! Even with the ban on photos I still enjoy what I’m doing and I still love Tennessee volleyball. And that is all that matters. Thanks for all the support this past week!

(BTW - In a few emails and forum posts some people mentioned the small audience of the website — a reference to the “22 hits a day” quote I made below. I should mention that’s the daily average for the entire year, which includes the months of January-July when the site gets hardly any hits at all as it is not updated often. During the season the average hovers between 50-100 a day. I don’t care how few people visit, but in the interests of full disclosure I thought I should mention that. I don’t want anyone to think I was low-balling the hit count to get sympathy!)

Before I make the main point of this post let me explain why I created this site as it may help you understand what may be coming.

I run two other websites in addition to this one. Like this one both started as a simple way to share a passion with other like minded people. But in the years they have been online they have become very popular. One, a site about history started nine years ago, has had me interviewed in newspapers, radio, and even on C-SPAN once. The other, an entertainment news site started five years ago, has gone from me pitching in every now and then to me running the place. In that time it has grown from a few guys doing it on their own to a staff with the support from the movie studios. Unfortunately with the popularity has come more responsibilities and stress. The sites just aren’t as much fun to run as they used to be and I was starting to get burned out. I considered dropping out of one of them. Instead I got the idea that maybe all I needed was another site that was just done for my enjoyment — no pressures from readers or sources — just like when I first started out. That’s when the idea of this blog was born.

It has been a lot of fun. Whenever I get tired of the hassles of the other sites I spend some time here running stats, formatting pictures, or just tweaking the HTML code. Weird way to relax, I know! And it’s been really cool hearing from the friends and family who enjoy getting to hear about and see their player when they’re far from home. About the only real problem has been when people confuse this site with the official site. As I’m technically a booster I’m not allowed to have direct contact with potential recruits. I contacted the UT Compliance Department and they confirmed that and suggested I just forward any correspondence to the athletics department. I’ve had to do that a few times. I added a new disclaimer to the top of the site and shut down the forums partly out of not wanting someone I wasn’t allowed to talk to using it. But other than that things have been great.

Until now. I was informed today that I am not allowed to take pictures or video and post them on the internet. I’m not sure what that means for the site yet. I was told if I was part of the press I could contact media relations and get credentialed. But I’m not sure the hassle of that would be worth it. As I said, this was supposed to be an enjoyable site for me. I don’t want to be media, I want to be just a fan in the bleachers.

I’m not putting down UT at all — if that’s their policy then that’s their policy. But it seems applying it to a tiny site about volleyball that averages 22 hits a day when there are so many more major blogs about football and basketball out there, not to mention YouTube and Flickr videos and photos, is a little odd. If any sport needed a little extra promotion it’s not football or basketball!

So in the next few days I’ll decide what will happen to this site. I enjoy doing the stats and all but I doubt that’s the main reason many people come here! I had planned on going to Georgia but that will be up in the air as well. In the next day or two I’ll also be removing all the photos and videos on the site — so get ‘em while you can!

Thanks to all of those who visit. I’d really like to continue doing this site for you, and I’ll try to have a decision in a day or two. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to share any thoughts on all this. I’d love to hear form you.

We’re just 14 days away from the start of the 2008 season! Look for the news updates to start flowing faster as we approach August 29th. In the meantime I’m working hard under the hood to get the site ready. I’ve archived the 2007 data, updated the 2008 schedule and roster, and added a search engine. On a sadder note I’ve removed the 2007 seniors from the random photos that appear on the right sidebar! Still left to do: finish some archiving, update the spreadsheet I use to keep track of stats, and decide what to do about the forum — for now I’ve just removed the link to it.

And here’s an update I know you’ve all been dying to hear about! I have not replaced my camera! I know, I know, I talked all last season about how bad it was in the conditions at Stokely. But we’re not at Stokely this year! And it’s a really great camera when it gets enough light. So I’ve decided to hold off until I see how it performs at Thompson-Boling.

Just wanted to let you know I’m heading to San Diego for the next two weeks. So there won’t be any more updates until August. Look for things to pick up in a big way around that time, though, as we’ll be less than 30 days away from the season opener!

Hello! I’m still here! I’ve spent the last few months working on some other sites I run while we’ve been in the off season. And while those other sites will continue to take up most of my available online time, I’ll also be back posting here now that things are starting to pick up.

So much to talk about! Where’s Jena? Who’s Gregg? Will the team be playing any spring tournaments? Is Stokely being demolished? SEC beach volleyball? 25!!!??? Over the next few days I’ll start posting about some of these things.

BTW - Speaking of the upcoming practice tournaments, I only have what seems to be very tentative information about them. If anyone has more definite info I’d appreciate it if you could send it my way. (via email or in the forum - no registration required). Thanks for any help out there!

I mentioned last week that I would not be going anywhere for awhile and updates would still be coming. Then I disappeared! My apologies! I got a really bad cold and was drugged up with cold medications for the past week. I’m back online now and will get right back to work finishing up my planned updates. Later today look for a story with some of the records that were broken this season.

I just wanted to let those of you still visiting the site know that I do have some updates coming, I’ve just been too busy to do them this weekend! Look for the player stats to be updated and a match recap to hopefully go up today. Then later this week I’ll do a final look at the record book. Either this week or next I will get a season recap up. And sometime before the end of the year I plan on posting full-resolution versions of all the pictures I took this season.

When I started this site I admitted it might only last for a few months. I called it a bit of an experiment, and said that I’d “give this idea a shot this season and see how it goes”. Why was I so tentative about the future? Well, it begins before the site even went up. To research the kind of things I should do on a webpage like this I looked for fan-run sites for other college volleyball teams and was shocked that I couldn’t find anything - not even for the top teams in the country. And, let’s be honest, Tennessee isn’t the most popular team and our matches aren’t the best attended. Would a fan page for the Lady Vols be of interest to anyone since even Nebraska, Stanford, and Florida don’t seem to have people willing to do something like this for them? So I said up front that I’d decide whether or not to continue the site after the season.

The good news is I’ve had so much fun doing this that I wouldn’t be quitting even if no one was visiting. And the even better news is that people are visiting in pretty good numbers! I run several other websites that average several thousand hits a day, so I know the number that visit here is not really a lot. But since I was afraid no one was going to read this blog at all I’m thrilled with what I have! And I’m having a lot more fun working on this page than I am on my other sites with more visitors! So TennesseeVolleyball.net will be staying on for as long as I’m able to run it!

Now that the season is over things will slow down obviously but I will get any off-season news up as it happens. I also have some behind the scenes stuff I want to do to make the website better for next season (here’s a peak: working on a way to make it easier to find stuff on the site; creating a new, more informative roster page; getting a gameday chat room running so fans who can’t make a match can discuss what’s going on live; and lots more).

Thanks for all your visits and support this season. My email box and the forum are always open if you have any questions or comments. I look forward to continuing this site in the coming seasons - and off-seasons!

I’ve posted some pictures of the Lady Vols celebrating their win over LSU that were sent to me by a fan, and some pictures I took at the Louisville game. Check them out on the Photos page!

I have moved around a lot in my life. My father was in the Air Force so we never lived in one place for more than a few years. From 1st to 12th grades I attended nine different schools! All told I lived in six different states before he retired to his hometown of Knoxville, where I finished high school and started college at the University of Tennessee. Since leaving college I have continued to be on the move. In fact I’ve changed addresses six times between three states in the 13 years since. I moved back to Knoxville in late 2006. The main reason I started this website was because I was so thrilled that I was finally going to be able to really follow my favorite team that I wanted to throw myself into my fanaticism in a big way!

Is there a point to this post? Yes!

First of all, I had always planned for this blog to be a lot more personal than it ended up being. I didn’t want just facts, figures, and links. I wanted more of a conversational dialogue along with it. Unfortunately, I have not done a great job of getting that tone down. Maybe I’ll do better from now on!

But the real reason I bring this up is to admit that during all my moves around the country I have actually picked up five favorite college teams. Luckily for me, during all the conference upheavals in the 1990’s and 2000’s all five of them ended up in different conferences. Which means I rarely have to worry about them playing each other! This week brings one of those rare match-ups. Tuesday Tennessee travels to the town I lived in from 2002-2006 (and where my son was born!) - Louisville, Kentucky - to take on the Cardinals. So I can’t miss this chance to follow the Lady Vols up and watch both teams play!

As a true college sports fanatic I obviously have a pecking order for my five favorites for just such moments. And Tennessee is far and away my favorite team! But it will be great to see another team I like that I don’t get to see much anymore.

I hope this personal aside didn’t bore you too much! I’ll get back to dry facts and figures soon enough!

(PS: I know you’re just dying to know the full list of my favorite college teams! ;) So here they are in the order in which I root for them: Tennessee, East Carolina, Baylor, Louisville, Air Force.)