1/11/25
The 2025 season is off with a bang this weekend with many D3 men’s volleyball teams on the schedule for opening weekend. A few matches were played this past week as well. Our preseason report count is approaching 50 teams of the 128-team universe, and we will be concluding these presentations by next week on the 15th. We will post our final pre-season ranking at that point as well, based on the enormous collection of data to this point.
We continue to collect data and update our database. The PSR’s take time and although we were not able to present ALL of the teams, rest assured we have collected and updated database information for almost every club.
The defending Champs Cal Lutheran hosted a kick-off tournament this weekend in Thousand Oaks. Mount Union defeated the Kingsmen on Friday night in a shocker. Here is a link to an article on the match. CLICK HERE
St. John Fisher is off to an awesome start of their 2025 season with 2 big wins on Saturday in addition to a defeating Trine on Friday. They defeated Lancaster Bible and Mount Saint Joseph in sweeps on Saturday. The big surprise for us was the return of both Griffin Stella and Jake Baker as graduate students. This will certainly put them back in the top 10 in the pre-season analysis. Stella was on his game against LBC posting a match high 10 kills while hitting .444.
Hobart got their first win of the season powered by a zero-error performance by Andrew Kim who hit .545 with 12 kills, 7 aces, and 2 blocks. Zack Farren had 20 assists and Noah DeLong had 9 kills for the Statesmen. POLY held the score pretty close at 20, 19, 22 given indications that they may be better than originally forecasted. Hobart finished off their second match with a straight set take down of Buffalo State. Andrew Kim with 18 kills and just 2 hitting errors in this one.
Wittenberg is off to a great start, taking down both Roanoke on Friday night and Concordia Chicago on Saturday. Both matches were sweeps. InsideHitter placed Wittenberg in the preseason top 25 at #21. Michael Yurk led the team in kills with 10 against Roanoke and Eli Halverson had 14 kills against Concordia Chicago. Wittenberg will visit St. John Fisher next Friday night which should be a very good match to watch.
Buffalo State held close to Misericordia in their 4-set match on Saturday. But Jared Piontkowski had 18 kills and Anthony DePalma added 12 for Miz to gain the victory. Gavin Wilczewski had 14 kills for Buffalo State while Jackson Stang added 30 assists.
Misericordia had less luck against a very strong Lasell team that picked up their second victory of the season after beating Nazareth earlier in the day. Lasell has looked great in their opening games. Theo Zaharewicz had 18 kills and Jordan Shinaut added 14 in their win against Misericordia. Ben Villa had 5 blocks, 7 digs, and 6 kills in the match without making a hitting error.
After opening the season this past week with a loss to D2 Menlo, UC Santa Cruz has put down three straight sweeps against D3 foes, including a big win over Mount Union who had just dropped defending champs Cal Lutheran. The Banana Slugs sophomore MB Kyle Ownbey has been on fire this season and already has posted 40 kills in 4 matches and is hitting .623 on the season. Andrew Pak has averaged over 9 assists per set and Riley Norman has already slammed 9 aces. Marcus Donchaunchon has 22 digs, and a serve receive percentage of .981 thus far over 4 games and MB Ethan Makashima has put back 11 blocks. The Slugs freshman AJ Contreras has already received some time on the floor notching 8 kills and he is a player to watch as the season progresses. The win over Mount Union was convincing after a tight 29-27 first set victory. UCSC will now face weekend home matches with Dominican, Cal Lutheran, Carthage and New Paltz.
Juniata is off to a jackrabbit start as well going 2-0 on opening weekend with lopsided wins over Chatham and Hiram. The Eagles posted hitting percentages of .493 vs .047 against Hiram and .390 vs. .000 against Chatham. Nathanael Brown led Juniata with 9 kills vs. Chatham and Chase Robbins had 12 kills vs. Elmira. The Juniata Invitational occurs next weekend with an interesting matchup on the slate against University of Puerto Rico on Friday night.
Carthage opened the season with sweeps over Lakeland and St. Norbert. The Firebirds sophomore outside hitter Owen Henricks is currently leading the team in kills with Owen Otto close behind. Hendricks hit .909 against Lakeland and .588 against St. Norbert. Carthage heads to the Slug-Slam next weekend in California.
