Sunday Cardinal Couple - Mostly Olympics

Volleyball Gets a Verbal

Alanna Bankston, from Omaha Nebraska has verbally committed to come play for UofL Volleyball.  Alanna is in the class of 2023, so we still have a few years before we'll see her in a UofL uniform.

A 6'1" middle, Bankston would be looking to drop into the middle position behind current middles Phekran Kong and Cara Crese.  Anna Stevenson, Amaya Tillman, and Emily Scott, the other middles on the current roster, would be expected to graduate before Bankston would arrive.

Olympics Updates

Field Hockey

As Case mentioned in yesterday's articles, Cardinal Field Hockey Alumna Ayeisha McFerran was on the Olympic Field Hockey pitch with the Irish National Team in a game against South Africa.  At the time of Case's writing, the score was 2-0, and indeed that did end up being the final score.  McFerran was credited with one save in the game.

I didn't get the chance to see this one, but from the stats it appears that Ireland was in pretty firm control of the game throughout.  Ireland ended up with 16 shots, with nine of those being on penalty corners, one field shot and one penalty corner were the scores.  South Africa only had three shots with only one penalty corner.

The next opportunity to see McFerran and the Irish will be tonight at 9pm when they face the Netherlands.  Based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the state of international Field Hockey competition, I would expect the Netherlands to prove to be a more formidable foe than South Africa was.

Volleyball

In a late match yesterday, the US Women's Volleyball team beat Argentina in straight sets to open their Olympic campaign, 25-20, 25-19, 25-20.

Hitting leaders were Jordan Thompson, 18 on 23 attempts, who lit up UofL in 2019 in a five set match in Cincinnati, hitting .392 on 41 kills in 72 attempts.  Michelle Bartsch-Hackley, an Illinois alumna who hit 11 of 25.  And longtime WNT member Jordan Larson, a Nebraska alumna and teammate of Dani Busboom Kelly put down 8 kills on 21 attempts.

Softball

In what may be a shock, I didn't actually watch the volleyball match, as I was engrossed in the US Softball game vs Australia.

Monica Abbott was in the circle against the Matildas, and was part of an epic pitcher's duel with Tarni Stepto.  Scoreless after the regulation seven innings, both teams took advantage of the International Tiebreaker rules which puts a runner on second base to start any extra innings.  A bit of a breakdown in Abbott's pitching, plus the extra starting base runner, got the extra runner home on an uncharacteristic walk from Abbott with bases loaded.

The US was able to answer in the bottom of the eighth.  Ally Carda was the extra base runner, and Haylie McCleney beat out a throw from the shortstop putting the runners on 1st and 2nd.  A sacrifice from Janie Reed advanced the runners to 2nd and 3rd.  Then Michigan grad Amanda Chidester stepped to the plate and ripped a line shot out to center field for the walk-off double.

3x3 Basketball

A couple of wins in the books for US 3x3 basketball, yesterday.  A 17-10 win over a very well-regarded French team, and a cruise to a 21-9 win over Mongolia with three minutes left on the clock.  Another game occurred very early this morning (4:30am EDT) with the US easily beating Romania, 22-11 with over two and a half minutes left on the clock and then the most recent game finished just before 9am, a 20-16 win over the Russian ROC team.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour Podcast

With a new calling setup in place, yesterday's CCRHP was a bit of a trial run that seems to have a succeeded pretty well.  Four of the crew, we were missing Daryl, used VDO.Ninja to connect.  The goal was to get better control over audio levels of each participant, and I believe we did achieve that.

Certainly Case, when doing the light touch of editing he does to put out the episode into the podcasts networks, expressed delight as he was doing his work.  Relistening to the Youtube livestream and the balance, even on-the-fly and live, seemed better as well.

We discussed some of the Olympics, but we also dove into some UofL basketball players' other activities in international basketball.  We gave our starting lineup predictions for basketball.  We celebrated incoming volleyball freshman Paige Morningstar collecting yet another "Pennsylvania Player of the Year" honor.

You can check out the livestream below, or catch the podcast on your favorite podcast network source.  I'll just cut-and-paste the links that Case put together in yesterday's article:

Anchor (podcast host): Link
Apple Podcasts: Link
Breaker: Link
Google Podcasts: Link
Overcast (free account required): Link
Pocket Casts (free account and app required): Link
RadioPublic: Link
Spotify: Link

JMcA