Pitt volleyball has a problem — a good problem, but a problem nonetheless. It has suffered four consecutive losses in the Final Four.
If you’re new to Pitt, here’s a quick recap. Last season, head coach Dan Fisher assembled his best team yet, but still lost to Pitt’s bitter rivals, Louisville, in the National Semifinal. The year before that, it got swept by Nebraska. Before that, a four-set loss to Louisville. And in Pitt’s first Final Four appearance, it lost in four sets to Nebraska.
Fisher, along with his assistant coaches — Kellen Petrone and Kamalani Akeo — are the only people to experience all four of these soul-crushing defeats. No player on Pitt’s roster has experienced more than two.
“It’s a hump for me,” Fisher said. “None of these girls were [at Pitt] four years ago.”
But that is not to say the pain hits any differently when you lose in a Final Four for the first or second time. It took redshirt senior middle blocker Bre Kelley, who was playing in her first National Semifinal last season, about two months to get over the loss.
And for 2024’s AVCA National Player of the Year, junior opposite hitter Olivia Babcock — who was competing in her second consecutive Final Four — it took until the team started to train again in the spring to get over the defeat.
Neither Babcock nor Kelley have watched the loss to Louisville over again in its entirety. Kelley tried to watch the game, but she ended up watching only a set and a half — she couldn’t bear to watch her team collapse in the KFC Yum! Center. And Babcock hasn’t watched even a single point from the game.
During the one and a half sets that Kelley watched and for the rest that she remembers, she had one big takeaway for Pitt.
“Being more unified in that time when things are chaotic,” Kelley said. “Unified and communicating with each other more during that period of time. We got a little quiet at times, and we now know what we need to fix.”
Since the loss, Pitt has lost a ton of talent and only has three starters returning: Babcock, Kelley and sophomore middle blocker Ryla Jones. It will look like an entirely different team when it goes out to face Nebraska on Aug. 22 — 246 days after its loss to Louisville.
But the 2025 version of Pitt volleyball may end up just as great.
“The reason it took me so long to recover was because I was scared of what we would look like the next year,” Babcock said. “But now, playing with this group, I’m confident that there’s going to be no problem at all.”
Redshirt senior libero Emery Dupes, a transfer from Florida State, is more than likely one of the many reasons Babcock is so confident in the 2025 version of Pitt volleyball. Dupes is a former All-ACC freshman team libero who has All-ACC First-Team potential.
And when the Florida State transfer got to Pitt in the spring semester, she saw why Pitt is competing for National Championships and why Florida State — a No. 7-seed in the 2024 NCAA Tournament — is just hoping to make it to the second weekend.
“It’s just another level here,” Dupes said. “It’s so intense every single time, and that’s a good thing, because if we’re being so intense in practice, when it comes to game time, it’s going to be so comfortable for us because we’re used to that environment.”
It’s a long, long path to the Final Four. But if any coach in the country knows how to get their team there, it’s Dan Fisher. It’s just a matter of time until he lifts a National Championship Trophy above his six-foot-six frame.
“We keep showing up to the party. Eventually, we will get through,” Fisher said.
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