Did anyone else make it out to the exhibition match vs Cleveland St last week? There are lots of new faces on the roster this season. The exhibition was pretty tough to read. They played 4 sets. Ohio dominated the first set and won convincingly. The second set was very tight, with Cleveland St taking the set. Set 3 was very one-sided towards Cleveland St. The 4th set, Ohio came back and played strong and won. Looking at Cleveland St's results from last year, they were basically a slightly above .500 Horizon League team. I saw the MAC coaches poll on IG this week, and they had Ohio #5 behind Buffalo, Ball St, BGSU, and WMU.

It will be interesting to see how it goes this weekend in games that count. Xavier (18-12 last year), App St (14-15 last year), and Wright St (21-11, 15-3 in conference in 2023) play in Athens this weekend.

I thought the ladies played well over the weekend. They came out of the tourney 2-1 with wins over Xavier and App St. Wright St never lost a set (I believe) the entire weekend, and Ohio fell to them in the finale. The Cats showed a lot of guts fighting back from a large deficit in the 3rd set and served twice for the set, up 24-23 and then 25-24, to ultimately lose to the Raiders 28-26. Lots of youth played a lot, so I'm sure there will be ups and downs. Hopefully the team gets and stays healthy and we see what they can do at full strength this season!

Heartbreaker to end a 3 match win streak, losing 17-15 in the 5th set. Amazingly Ohio is all the way down in 8th place with their 6-5 record. The bottom 4 teams are all pretty crappy, and Ohio only has 1 match remaining against any of them. 6 matches are against CMU, BG & Buffalo who may be the 3 best teams.

Taking all that together, it seems highly unlikely Ohio can obtain a top 6 spot to make the tourney.

+1

It seems like I say this every year, but it's a really young team. Only two seniors will walk for senior day today, and only 1 of the 2 plays a lot. We're running out a lot of freshmen and sophomores. As of today, Ohio stands at 6 in the MAC, and the top 6 make the MAC tourney. The game today against Buffalo (who is a game ahead of us) is obviously huge. There have been ups and downs, but I do feel like this young core has a lot of talent.

As expected, Ohio lost both final matches to BG, who finishes 16-2...and Toledo won both final matches to Kent who finishes 1-17. Ohio & Toledo finish tied for 6th at 10-8. I do not know what occurred in the tiebreaker (they split head to head) but Toledo got the berth and Ohio did not. This is really a shame as I think Ohio not only got better thru the season but also experienced some bad luck and tough losses. Even the final match today went to a 5th set but Ohio couldn't close it out. Ohio was swept just 2 times all season. Toledo was swept in 4 of their final 7 matches. I think the rest of the MAC tourney field is happy to see Ohio fall short.

2 Contributing Seniors head out but overall a very strong nucleus should be returning for next year.

Just to wrap this up...Toledo got whacked 3-0 (75-48) right off the bat. Both the top 2 seeds got beat right away, then #4 WMU smoked Ball St 3-0 (75-46) in the championship. Just further proof it could've been interesting if we were able to sneak in. #NextYear