BYU volleyball: Cougar spikers survive up-and-down year

PROVO — Naturally, it was safe to assume the BYU volleyball team would have to tackle the 2008 season as a rebuilding one. After all, the Cougars had lost a couple of very important cogs to their attack in head coach Jason Watson and all-everything Chelsea Goodman.

But when the season began, everything was looking up. The Cougars were ranked in the top 25, new coach Shay Goulding was starting to mesh with her players, and seniors Bryn Porter and Rachel Dyer were becoming solid team leaders.

Then it all fell apart. Conference season started and the Cougars just couldn't find a way to win, nothing they tried seemed to work, and the team and coaching staff were becoming disheartened.

"It was a tough season. I'm glad to go out strong. We improved as a team, and I'm proud of being part of the great tradition," said Porter after her last match ever as a Cougar.

And it did seem to all come together about midway through the conference season when everything began to click. A five-game match against Utah, which the Cougars lost, a five-game match against Colorado State, which BYU won, and a three-game sweep of Wyoming put a nice capper on a roller-coaster season.

"I'm just glad it ended better than it started. We just finally came together and started to compete harder," said Dyer.

And the Cougars did finish the year with a 14-12 record, a far cry from where they wanted to be after starting the year 7-1, but not bad all-in-all after the rough 2-6 start to the conference season.

"We finished with a winning season. There aren't many teams that get to finish with a win. We really learned how to execute a game plan. The problems that we had in the past, we corrected. We picked up more balls and had more opportunities to hit a ball (at the end of the season)," said Goulding.

Much of the improvement came with a change that included moving ex-Lehi star Christina Measom into the starting lineup and gave her much more playing time and the opportunities that went with it.

Measom will be back next year, as will everyone on the team except Dyer, who was named to her third straight all-MWC team, and Porter. Kayla Walker will also make a return appearance to the squad after making the all-MWC team in her first season after transferring to BYU from Pepperdine.

And the Cougars will be bringing in a great recruiting class to shore things up.

The nation's No. 6 recruit out of Monroe, Wash., Kylin Munoz, an outside hitter who was recruited by more than 100 schools in the nation, signed with BYU. And in-state product Kathryn LeCheminant, a middle blocker out of Layton High School, will bring plenty of energy and power to the team as well.

"I can't tell you how excited I am about next season. I have a sense of urgency to attack next spring. We have a great, talented team coming up," said Goulding.

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