The UW Oshkosh women’s volleyball team competed in the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference tournament last week, beating UW-Platteville in the semifinal round and losing to UW-Whitewater in the championship round.
UWO started their time in the WIAC tournament in the semifinals due to being the No. 1 seed again. The Titans faced off against the No. 4 seeded Pioneers on Thursday Nov. 14 in a rematch after Pioneers swept the Titans Sept. 25. This time, the Titans got the best of the Pioneers in a five-set win 3-2. Sami Perlberg led the team with 24 kills and Izzy Coon led the team in assists with 34. UWO came back down two sets to one, and in the fifth set, after a back-and-forth battle, the Titans won the set 20-18 with a kill from Perlberg
UWO fell in the championship game to the No. 3 seeded Warhawks in a 3-2 battle where this time unlike the Titans win against UWW on Sept. 18 where UWO beat the Warhawks in five sets. UWO held an 11-8 lead in the fifth set, but could only muster up one more point before the Warhawks scored the 15th point to repeat as WIAC tournament champs.
The Titans will shift their attention to the NCAA Division III tournament as UWO heard their name called in the selection show on Monday. Coach Jon Ellmann is excited for the opportunity to play in the tournament.
“It is an experience that some never get to have in their career,” Ellmann said. “So for us, we get to cherish the moment to play together again.”
The Titans earned an at-large bid to the 2024 NCAA tournament, and they will be traveling to Marietta, Ohio, for the regional round of the tournament.
UWO will hope to replicate the success of last year’s tournament where the Titans beat Greenville University (Illinois) 3-0, Gustavus Adolphus College (Minnesota) 3-0 and the University of La Verne (California) 3-1 to win the regional round and advanced to the Elite Eight for the first time since 2009. UWO eventually fell to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (California) in the Elite Eight for a fifth-place finish at the national tournament.
Ellmann said that even though most of the personnel is the same as last season, they can’t look back at last season coming into this week due to how different the competition is.
“The reality is that every season is so different,” Ellmann said. “The opponents are different, even with a large majority of people returning every year is its own adventure.”
The Titans will open up the 2024 tournament with a match against Marymount University (Virginia) in the first round Nov. 18. The Saints are coming into the tournament with a 12-21 record after winning the Atlantic East Conference Championship.
The other seven teams that are participating in the regional are host Marietta University (Ohio) (23-1), University of Chicago (Illinois) (24-10), Centre College (Kentucky) (22-6), Franklin & Marshall College (Pennsylvania) (23-6), Illinois Wesleyan University (22-9) and St. John Fischer University (New York) (21-8).
Ellmann said that an advantage this team will have heading into the tournament is facing the level of competition they had to play at the end of the WIAC schedule.
“We have played one of the toughest schedules this year, and there hasn’t really been anything we haven’t seen in an ability to score from any position,” he said.
The Titans game versus Marymount will take place at 10:30 a.m. cst, you can check the results of the game at the UWO athletics website.
