"I wouldn't say I was disappointed [with the loss] because if somebody would have said to me at the beginning of the year, 'Looking at the players you have, you're going to win the Big Ten and make it to the finals of the Regionals, would you sign this?' And I would have signed, for sure," Penn State women's volleyball coach Russ Rose said. "I felt better about this team going as far as they went than some teams that made it to the Final Four and didn't close the deal."
The story of this Nittany Lions team all season has been that it lacked in size and power, it made up for with hard work and team chemistry. That is precisely how the women pushed past Minnesota in the final weekend of Big Ten play to clinch the conference crown and how they fought their way past Pittsburgh in the NCAA second round to earn a trip to Florida. They earned their Saturday night date with the Gators in the same manner, as they came back from a 30-12 loss in their first game in the Regional semifinals to defeat Kansas State 3-1 (12-30, 30-27, 30-21, 31-29).
Finally meeting their match against Florida's big blocks, hard hits and powerful jump serves, the Lions watched as the final ball to dropped in the back corner of the court ending a season they milked for all it was worth.
"The season was a great reflection on what I talk about when I do clinics all the time: sometimes a team can play better than the individual parts," Rose said. "I don't think we had the best middles, the best outsides or the best right sides in a lot of the matches, but we won a lot of matches because we played very well as a team. This team got as much out of what they had to offer as they could."
The 2003 season put Penn State women's volleyball back on a track that it has fallen off of a bit in recent years.
The team won the program's first Big Ten Championship since 1999 and reached the NCAA Regional final again after two consecutive years of early exits in the NCAA second round.
While the players accomplished what they did as a team, there was no shortage of individual accolades. Senior middle hitter Cara Smith was named to the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) All-America first team, while sophomore setter Sam Tortorello was named to the second team and senior opposite Erin Iceman earned honorable mention.
All three players were also named to the All-Big Ten team, and freshman middle hitter Cassy Salyer was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year as well as AVCA Mideast Region Freshman of the Year.
Rose, who has now accrued 799 career wins, was named Big Ten Coach of the Year.
With the departure of four seniors from the roster, it will be the two All-Americans that will leave the most noticeable holes, especially Smith, whose intense leadership ensured that this would be the year the program got back on track.
"I don't think we can replace the leadership portion that Cara brought," Rose said. "We're going to need some leadership; we're going to need some people to really step up and keep the group focused on the things they do need to work on."
The squad will need to achieve what Rose terms "an entirely different level of physicality" to get back into a position where it will be able to qualify for the Final Four with the idea of competing for a national championship. But if this season proved anything, it proved that hard work and playing well together could go a long way.
As for the women themselves, well, they believed that all along.
Send an 
