Volleyball successful at UTA tournament, hires assistant coach
Tim Cato / Senior Staff Writer
The Mean Green volleyball team finished its final tournament over the weekend and will finish its spring season tonight with a game against Texas Women’s University.
On Saturday at the University of Texas-Arlington College Tournament, UNT (8-4) played four matches, sweeping three teams 2-0 – Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Oklahoma and Southern Methodist University – while falling to Texas Christian University 1-2.
“This tournament was awesome,” sophomore outside hitter Hanna Forst said. “It felt great. We lost in three to TCU ,but I was OK with it because we played so hard and we played so well. It could have gone either way.”
The team is still adjusting to new head coach Andrew Palileo, a former Pac-12 Coach of the Year who was hired on April 3. Palileo replaced head coach Ken Murczek, who accepted a head coaching position with Wake Forest University’s volleyball program.
“I thought we improved quite a bit from our first weekend,” said Palileo. “We went back and focused just on a couple of things for this weekend because I wanted to get a little bit better at them, and I thought they did a good job of that.”
Palileo is one step closer to putting all the pieces in play. Yesterday, he announced the signing of associate head coach Al Givens, who was most recently a head coach at Charleston Southern University and has more than 35 years of coaching experience.
“My job is to make [Palileo]’s job easier,” Givens said. “I have to take care of all the little stuff so he can focus on the big stuff. The good thing about Andrew is that no job is too big for him, or too small, so I’ve got to sometimes tell him, ‘You don’t have to deal with that, let me take care of [it].’”
Texas Women’s University
After a tournament on April 20 was cancelled, Palileo wanted to schedule in one more opportunity of live action for his team, resulting in a scrimmage against TWU.
“This will be a good way to finish out for us,” Palileo said. “[There is] just one day of practice that happens in the regular season, so this is a good opportunity for them to fill some of the gaps from this weekend.”
The game will start at 3:30 p.m. in the Mean Green Volleyball Center and admission is free.
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