Women's volleyball season wrapup

No loss for words to describe season

By Mike Cisneros
Assistant Sports Editor

There are many words that can describe the 1997 season for the USC women's volleyball team.
Determination, speed and disappointment are a few of them.
However, surprise is not.
At least not to any member of the team, which, throughout the season, had the utmost confidence that it was a contender for the Pacific 10 Conference and national championships.
Junior middle blocker Jasmina Marinkovic took it even further when describing the 1997 team.
"This is the best team play ever," Marinkovic said. "I've been here for three years, and this is the best team ever."
However, to many people outside USC, the Women of Troy -- who finished the season at 23-6 -- exceeded expectations and surprised many.
USC's second-place finish (tied with Washington) was the school's highest in history and its regular-season finish was Head Coach Lisa Love's best in her nine years at USC.
Junior outside hitter Jennifer Kessy and Marinkovic became the eighth and ninth players to reach 1,000 kills in their careers, which garnered them All-Pac-10 first team honors, as well as an All-America selection for Marinkovic.
Marinkovic was the biggest surprise for the Women of Troy. She had the second-highest hitting percentage in school history, finishing at .394. She also hit at least .500 in 12 games this season and had four error-free hitting performances in 1997.
Despite the confidence and big play, the Women of Troy failed to play well in big games in addition to having problems defeating less powerful teams at the end of matches.
"When you have somebody down, you have to finish the task," Love once said of her team's problems.
These problems usually came to the team during big matches, like against UCLA, national champion Stanford or in the NCAA Tournament.
In the two matches against the Cardinal, the Women of Troy were full of confidence, but they were brought back to earth by a dominating Stanford team.
Stanford embarrassed USC in the first meeting, shutting out the Women of Troy in the second game, 15-0.
In the second meeting, USC had a bad hitting game, while Stanford outside hitter Kristin Folkl hit a career-high 33 kills to down the Women of Troy in four games.
Against UCLA, USC nearly lost a 2-1 advantage by losing the fourth game, barely holding on in the fifth to edge out its cross-town rival.
Finally, against Nebraska in the NCAA Tournament, the Women of Troy had one of their worst hitting performances of the season in one of their biggest games of the year, hitting a discouraging .146 for the match.
However, bright things are on the horizon for the Women of Troy, since the squad is losing just one player from the 1997 season.
Only senior Jeanne Vetter, who was supposed to make a big impact for the team this season but battled injury all year, will be lost to graduation, leaving the entire starting lineup back for 1998.