•  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!

• The official site has more photos and some video highlights of the Virginia Tech match.

• I’m working on resetting spreadsheets so it may be another day or two before I can update the stats pages and get the weekend recap out.

• The Knoxville News Sentinel has an article on the Lady Vols performance at the tournament.

UPDATE: Four Lady Vols hit over .380: Kayla Jeter (.381), Nikki Fowler (.429), Leah Hinkey (.455), and DeeDee Harrison (.571). Hinkey led with 5 blocks with Leslie Cikra just behind her with 4. Nikki Folwer’s impressive double double streak just barely ends at 18: she had 10 kills and 9 digs. Kelsey Mahoney had 18 assists and Emily Steinbeck had 14. A loud crowd of 1,307 was on hand — the fifth largest in Lady Vol history.

UPDATE: This time it was Carly Sahagian’s turn make an impression. She had 7 kills, hit .333, and lead the team with 12 digs. Nikki Fowler keeps her streak alive with 12 kills and 10 digs. She also had 3 aces, hit .357, and had two blocks. Kayla Jeter and Leah Hinkey led the blockers with 4 each. DeeDee Harrison had 11 kills and three blocks. Leslie Cikra had 7 kills, hit .333, and added in a couple of blocks. Amanda Friday, splitting libero duties, had 8 digs. The cool news was the return of Alyssa Hilby who came into the match for a few rotations. Hilby, who had a phenomenal freshman year, sat out last season due to an injury.

UPDATE: It was a breakout performance for two Lady Vols tonight. DeeDee Harrison was dominant at the net, knocking back 2 solo blocks and 3 block assists along with 7 kills. And freshman Kelsey Robinson impressed, with a wicked serve and just missing out on a double double in her college debut: 9 kills and a team leading 16 digs. The rest of the team did their part as well. Nikki Fowler got her 17th consecutive double double with 13 kills and 11 digs. Leah Hinkey hit .455, had 4 blocks, and 2 aces. Kayla Jeter had 7 kills and 3 blocks. Leslie Cikra had a .600 hitting percentage with 10 attacks and no errors, and added 3 blocks as well. Amanda Friday, donning the libero jersey, had a career high 13 digs. Kelsey Mahoney had 20 assists and 7 digs, while Emily Steinbeck had 17 assists and 8 digs. In the first set the team hit an outstanding .483, with just a single hitting error. For the match they were .299.

Stats | UT story and video (Patrick, Robinson, Fowler) | Xavier story

UPDATE: Show is now online (but will probably be removed on Monday). Patrick’s interview starts in the 9:00-9:15 segment and continues though the 9:30-9:45 segment.