The Litter Box

I can’t help but feel sorry for some of the teams I cover this week. I know, it’s homerish, but I am (contrary to some of my e-mail) a human being, after all.

First, there’s the volleyball team, victims of the Enterprise-Record feature curse. Basically, any time an E-R writer decides to write any kind of non-news piece about a player or team, failure is inevitable. Now, admittedly, I don’t believe in curses or jinxes. Or unicorns. But the Wildcats have lost three straight (two since last Friday’s feature ran) and haven’t been the upstart group that last year’s club was. Curious, since basically every player from that team has returned. Is the CCAA really that much better? Well, yeah.

Cal State San Bernardino is No. 1 in the nation, so a loss there really wasn’t a surprise. Sonoma State, which middled around at 13-14 last year, is the biggest early shocker in the conference at 12-1 and 4-0 in CCAA play. And Cal Poly Pomona and UC San Diego are always tough. Chico State is only 1-3 in conference games, and probably more disconcerting, is 0-2 in road games. Both the Sonoma State and Cal Poly Pomona games were winnable contests — the one against the Seawolves even more so as it was at home — so the early losses will definitely hurt. There’s more pressure now for the Wildcats to beat quality teams, and even Humboldt State has joined that discussion. The CCAA is no cakewalk this year, for anybody.

Also, I’m not quite sure how the NCAA does its rankings, but the No. 17 men’s soccer team somehow wins three games, two in its own conference, the other a 7-1 obliteration, and doesn’t move. At all. Strange, but even stranger when you consider that now-No. 5 Cal State L.A. wasn’t ranked at all last week. Apparently a pair of 1-0 conference home victories, including one over then-No. 4 Cal State Dominguez Hills, is enough to jump from unranked to the fifth-best team in Division II.

I’m a believer in the new Chico State team, and I think they've shown early that it’s entirely warranted. It will be another couple weeks before the Golden Eagles and the Wildcats go head-to-head so we can see just how much those pollsters really know. A more rational version of me concedes that they probably have a pretty good idea, but these rankings without explanations attached are just perplexing.

Posted by Travis Souders at 06:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Boy, those pollsters sure do like perfect records.

Don’t believe me? Check out the most recent NSCAA/Adidas Division II rankings, which have the Chico State men’s soccer team up three spots to No. 17 after a 4-0 start under spankin’ new coach Felipe Restrepo.

Part of this ascent — actually, a pretty large part — is senior Zac Crim, who has been involved in every game-deciding goal the Wildcats have scored in their so-far-perfect season. He’s already got 11 points, including four goals. He’s been the headliner of Chico State’s offense, no doubt. I remember him really seeming to like the Restrepo hire earlier in the year because there was that promise of opportunity for success. Well, it’s manifesting itself now, and Crim is responding by playing a prominent part in just about every offensive sequence the Wildcats string together.

In other Wildcat-related news today, the CCAA announced that it will add another team to the conference next year, Cal State East Bay. Meh, I say. I have mixed feelings on the East Bay in general, and none of them are particularly good. CSUEB is the Pioneers, which is just stupid geographically. Don’t pioneers discover things? East Bay folks all have navigation systems, everybody knows that. Let’s change the mascot to a white college guy in an Abercrombie polo, Bluetooth headset and a BMW driving home to his parents' house from Whole Foods instead.

I’ve been meaning to give the volleyball team a little bit of love and haven’t really gotten the chance to. Lindsay Macias and Erica Brick obviously have been getting theirs, but it’s nice to see that Chico State is going other places with its attacks now a little more. Gillian Heydorff, Megan Cape and Crystal Trifeletti, namely, have stood out as some surprise sources of kills (although Heydorff showed last year that she’s a legitimate threat, so maybe “surprise” isn’t the best word for her). But I’ll bet you can’t name the team’s leader in the stat so far ... unless you’re Luke Reid. Then you probably can.

If you’re not, though, it’s freshman Makenzie Snyder, with a nice, round 100. Yes, it’s early. But this kind of balance is the kind of thing that makes it both interesting and nerve-wracking for a team that’s been so dependent on Macias to be the hammer. She and Trifeletti both have 92 kills and Cape has 85. Maybe it’s Macias’ growing defensive responsibility (we saw a career-high in digs against Sonoma State last week).

To give an idea of just how rare it is for anyone else to play as significant of a role as she has, just look back at her three-year figures: She’s accounted for right around a quarter of the Wildcats’ attack scoring. In 2005, she put down 27.5 percent of the team’s kills and in 2006, it was 23. Last year she jumped right back up to 26.5 percent.

This year it seems to be all about Balance, with a capital B (in case you missed how I capitalized “Balance” just then).

Posted by Travis Souders at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)