Pitt volleyball: tradition of winning

Cue the music; the champ is here.

The defending Big East volleyball championPitt Panthers… Cue the music; the champ is here.

The defending Big East volleyball championPitt Panthers will begin the defense of their title starting on Saturday inside the friendly confines of Fitzgerald Field House. With a win over Syracuse on Sunday, the Panthers (20-7, 8-2) won 20 matches for the fourth time under fifth-year head coach Chris Beerman. The win also marked his 99th career win as head coach for Pitt. The No. 2-seeded Panthers will meet the No. 3-seeded Orange again on Saturday afternoon. The winner will go on to play Sunday afternoon for the championship against the winner of the Notre Dame and Boston College match.

If the Panthers and Irish win, it would set up a rematch of last year’s title match in South Bend, Ind. — a match the Panthers swept, 3-0.

However, without its star, Megan Miller, Pitt was swept by the Irish, as they staked claim to the tournament’s No. 1 seed. With Miller healthy, the Panthers are as good as anyone in the Big East, and last year’s title match proved it. The Irish had won three straight Big East titles, a streak the Panthers knew plenty about before last year’s upset. Notre Dame may be the favorite in the conference these days, but it wasn’t always like that.

When the Big East was conceived in 1982, head coach Shelton Collier’s Panthers made their impact felt right away, reaching the national top 20 for the first time in school history. The Panthers won the conference’s first-ever title, and during the next four years, the Panthers played in every title game, winning two of the four. By the end of the 1987 season, the Big East tournament had seen only three teams and two champions: the Panthers and the Providence Friars. The Panthers and Friars each won three of the first six titles before the Panthers decided it was their time to shine.

From 1988 to 1994, under four different head coaches, the Panthers reeled off seven straight tournament victories, highlighted by Ann Marie Lucanie being named the tournament’s most valuable player for the fourth straight year in 1993. She became the first athlete ever to accomplish the feat in the conference’s history. The Panthers were on top of the Big East volleyball world, but it wasn’t long before another power claimed rights to the top of the mountain.

In the following two years — 1995 and 1996 — the Panthers made the final of the tournament, but were defeated by the upstart Fighting Irish and head coach Debbie Brown. From 1995 to 2002, the Irish won seven of eight Big East titles under Brown and established themselves as a national threat and the team to beat in the conference.

In 2000, Beerman took over, determined to get the Panthers back to the top of the conference and established as a staple in the NCAA tournament. Finishing the year 22-10, the 2000 Panthers finished their best season in six years, and the turnaround was officially in place. Injuries forced his 2001 team to finish under .500 for the first time in the program’s history, but in 2002, the Panthers won 20 matches again and barely missed the conference tournament. That brought the revival to 2003, where the Panthers made the tournament and went on to win it for the first time in 10 years.

Before coaching at Pitt, Beerman led the James Madison Dukes to four straight winning seasons and their first NCAA tournament berth. He has continued that winning way at Pitt, making the East-Coast Panthers a threat in a sport dominated by Southern and West-Coast teams. Eighteen of the top 25 teams in the country, according to the coaches poll, are located either in the Southeast, Southwest or West Coast. Pittsburgh, known for its high school football, not volleyball, has not been the biggest help in reviving the Panthers program.

“You have to start form scratch,” Beerman said. “When I came here, [Pittsburgh] was not considered a hotbed at all. It is a goal of ours to be a top-25 program, and that continues to be the goal. The NCAA tournament is a consistent goal. We are on our way.”

Beerman has made that goal clear to the coaches and, more importantly, his players. Hitting the recruiting trail for eight months a year, Beerman says that telling players that your goal is to win is uncommon, but it might be what they want to hear.

“We have winning as a goal and you would be surprised how many teams are afraid to talk about that as a goal,” Beerman said. “I want players who want to win and can handle the pressure of winning and high expectations and can handle the pressure of a program that has national expectations. It takes a while to find kids that way, but when you do, they are fun to coach.”

Those types of players have been hard for Beerman to find inside the Keystone State –until this year, that is. Last year, Pitt lacked players from Pennsylvania on its roster, but this year, two players, Melissa Ferguson and Diana Andreyko, are both from nearby Baldwin. National recruiting has become the key element in keeping the Panthers in the title hunt.

“The most important thing — the national recruiting that we do — is very time consuming,” Beerman said. “It is an eight-month process that ends when the season starts again. We look for tough kids that are good players. They have to be a good athlete. We are confident in our ability to train, so you don’t have to be the best volleyball player, but we look for athletic ability first.”

One of those national recruits is the defending and inaugural Big East Libero of the year, Megan McGrane. McGrane, who hails from Indiana, said that Beerman recruits well because he stresses teamwork and wining as high priorities.

“He wants to recruit kids that really feel like they are coming to a program to win,” McGrane said. “They are in it to win and not just to get a scholarship and play division one volleyball. That’s part of the mentality that he brings into the program — people who are here to win.”

And a win is what they need this weekend to defend their Big East title. The first match between Notre Dame and Boston College starts at 1 p.m. on Saturday. Pitt’s match against Syracuse will follow at 3:30 p.m.