Dancing with the crown

The UTRGV Volleyball Team celebrates its WAC championship win after a 3-0 sweep over Utah Valley University in Las Cruces, N.M. Photo Courtesy Greg Owens

Winter may be fast approaching but the UTRGV Volleyball Team is riding a historic hot streak into the NCAA Tournament after being crowned conference champions for the first time in program history. While most teams are in the offseason, UTRGV has earned the right to play on.

Head Coach Todd Lowery and his squad are rewriting the record books at UTRGV in 2016 while posting a 21-13 record, the best in school history and bringing home a Western Athletic Conference Championship in the process.

In 2014, the year before Lowery took over the program, the team finished in seventh place at the bottom of the Western Athletic Conference with a 7-23 record. In just two years, Lowery has turned the UTRGV volleyball program into champions and is laying a winning foundation on and off the court.

He said the women have bought in and, with the right effort and attitude, earned the right to call themselves champs.

“They’re the ones who come in here and grind it out every day and have to listen to us,” Lowery said. “It’s fun for them to see the results of the stuff we’re talking about. I think the group really bought in and through the course of the year, we preach energy and effort and those kind of things and to go to the conference tournament and see if you do all those things right, then you get rewarded by going to the NCAA. It was a big step not only for the girls, but for the program.”

Junior right side hitter Bojana Mitrovic has had a big role in the team’s success, earning All-Tournament Team honors at the WAC Championship. Mitrovic, who played for Lowery as a freshman during UT Brownsville’s final season, said making the transition to a new program in UTRGV would be a challenge but one that the team embraced.

“The UTB program was a winning program. Coming here to a new program that didn’t have a winning culture was hard and it was hard to prove to people that we actually can play and that this program was going to improve because nobody really believed,” said Mitrovic, who hails from Novi Sad, Serbia. “Coach has his own mentality; that effort and attitude are the most important things and that’s how he guides us every day and that’s how this team works. There are no individuals here. People bought into it and we’re all on the same page.”

In two seasons, improvement has been fast and furious. The team started this season strong with a trademark win over Big-12 opposition, Baylor University. For a majority of the nonconference schedule, it was a road specialist. Playing 13 of 14 matches away from the Fieldhouse didn’t faze the group of women; they went 9-5 over that stretch, including tournament wins at Baylor, Tulane University and Florida Atlantic University.

Senior Alisha Watson, who worked four years to earn a conference championship, added an exclamation point during the WAC tourney in New Mexico, taking MVP honors. She also scored the historic final point in the third set of a sweep over Utah Valley University in the WAC championship match.

The WAC championship came on the back of upsets being a lower seed in each of UTRGV’s three wins. That has been the theme all season, winning games in which UTRGV was deemed the underdog. That was the case when the team took down tournament host New Mexico State University (24-7) on its home court in the WAC semifinals.

“It just feels great to know that we not only have the ability to hang with top teams and good programs like that, we have the ability to beat them, especially [beating them] in their own home, so I think that we’ll definitely fall back on that,” Watson said.

Four-year starter Watson has seen rough times. In her freshman season, UT Pan American went 13-20 overall and 2-14 in conference. During her career, Watson was a key in turning the team into a contender. She said being a part of an emerging program was part of the reason she came to Edinburg.

“While I was being recruited to come here and looking at this school, I chose to come here to leave a legacy,” the Round Rock native said. “I chose to come here to go to a university that isn’t necessarily established and somewhere that has potential to grow. I made that choice for a reason because I saw this coming for a long time.”

Outstanding blocking has led the way much of the year for UTRGV. Single-season records from freshman Barbara Silva and a strong sophomore season from Alexandra Ecker resulted in the pair accounting for 292 total blocks.

Silva, the freshman from Sao Paulo, Brazil, set the single-season program record for blocks. Her efforts were enough to land a spot on the WAC All-Freshman team. The newcomer has surprised many people, including herself.

“I didn’t expect that; when I came here, I knew it would be hard. The thing is, I felt that I fit in so well and everyone was helping me since the beginning,” Silva said. “I felt [at] home, so, probably, that was one of the reasons I could play my volleyball. I couldn’t expect a better year for me as a freshman.”

The team will now carry the WAC crown into the big dance, the NCAA Tournament, where 64 of the best schools from across the country battle on the court for a national championship.

Its first round opponent: the nationally ranked No. 4 University of Texas at Austin Longhorns.

Lowery is no stranger to playing on the big stage with four NAIA championships as a head coach during his time at UTB and National American University. His team will be ready to put it on the line on the road in Austin.

Mitrovic, who played in an NAIA championship match as a freshman, is ready for the tournament and the test that Texas presents.

“We don’t have any pressure. Our team is very excited and we’re looking forward to playing a big school like Texas. I think it’s huge for our program and huge for our community,” she said. “We’re very excited because a lot of people are going to come and support us. [The] mentality for us to go out there is to play hard and fight for every ball, fight for each other and play for the person next to you and see what happens.”

The NCAA Tournament first-round match between UTRGV and the Longhorns is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Friday at Gregory Gym on the UT Austin campus. The game can be viewed on the Longhorn Network.