Preview | No. 1 Pitt goes Duck hunting against Oregon

The Pitt volleyball team is in the Sweet Sixteen for the fifth consecutive year but with more pressure than ever.

The Panthers, for the first time in program history, are the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament and the front-runners in the Pittsburgh Regional to play in the Final Four next weekend.

Even with Pitt having an inside track to make it to Louisville for the Final Four next week, the team’s mentality stays the same.

“We try to go into every game as the underdog,” sophomore outside hitter Torrey Stafford said. “We always say underdog mentality. You never want to be too confident. And I think that with the number one seed, it could bring the pressure, but, like [we are] underdogs.”

Pitt will bring the underdog mentality to its match against Oregon in the Regional Semifinal, which it swept in the 2024 season opener in Eugene, Oregon. But that was the first game of the season, and the two teams have grown and adapted as the season has gone on.

“Some of their tendencies have changed from the beginning of the year as you would expect,” Oregon head coach Matt Ulmer said about Pitt from the beginning of the season. “I think we are pretty different from the beginning of the year [too].”

The biggest difference Pitt has from the beginning of the season is redshirt junior middle blocker Bre Kelley. The junior looks fully healthy compared to how healthy she was in the August matchup.

“[Pitt] still used [Kelley] really effectively against us,” Ulmer said. “She just wasn’t swinging very hard, but she was fast tipping the ball around and we had a hard time with that.”

Kelley is now swinging hard at practically everything that comes her way and is hitting .516 for the Panthers this season. But besides Kelley getting healthier, the Panthers’ personnel is largely the same. Oregon, however, has changed a lot since the season opener.

The Ducks’ biggest change is their starting setter is now redshirt first-year Cristin Cline instead of junior Roberta Purashaj. In Oregon’s second round matchup against TCU, she led her team to a stellar .271 hitting percentage.

Pitt hit .265 against Morehead State in the first round and .250 against Oklahoma in the second round. Those are solid numbers, but not up to the No. 1 hitting percentage in the nation standards Pitt has held practically all season long.

But the drop-off is expected when it comes to Tournament time, as points don’t come easily.

“I feel like every point matters,” Stafford said. “We talk about that in our [practices], doing it now and not waiting to the next one and after that. I feel like that is really important going into these next games.”

“At this stage in the tournament, every team’s so talented, we’re not going into it expecting anything,” senior libero Emmy Klika said.

Pitt head coach Dan Fisher uses the mantra of “we don’t know if we’ll win, but we know we can,” this time of the year because his team is more than aware of how hard it is to win in December.

“We’re just expecting that every team is going to play their best against us and give us their best,” Klika said. “I mean, our seasons are on the line in the tournament.”

Pitt will try to keep its season alive today, against Oregon, where the Panthers plan on going Duck hunting.

“We’re going hunting…. It’s like hunter versus hunted,” Stafford said. “There’s all these things that we talked about, like, underdog mentality, but then, that’s just kind of, like attacking the attack, like someone’s gonna be attacking us.”