CSUN Proving Pollsters Wrong Along Campaign Trail

Everywhere you look these days, the Big Sky is falling to the Cal State Northridge women’s volleyball team.

Few saw it coming.

Conference coaches picked Northridge to finish last in a preseason poll, but early opinions have changed dramatically in light of the Matadors’ 6-0 start and two-match lead in the standings.

If the Matadors were mysterious guests entering their first year in the conference, they need no introduction now.

“You mean those high-flying, Big Sky folks,” said Idaho State Coach Bill MacLachlan, whose team will play the Matadors at 7 tonight at Northridge in a key conference match.

It will be a homecoming for MacLachlan, a 1974 graduate of Monroe High. But he acknowledges Idaho State (11-9, 4-2 in the conference) will have a tough time keeping Northridge (7-8) from celebrating another victory. The Matadors won their seventh consecutive match and first in nonconference play Tuesday, beating Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in four games.

“I’ve seen them on film and they’ve got some really nice players,” he said. “We need to play well. If we don’t, we’re in trouble.”

MacLachlan and other Big Sky coaches said Northridge’s 2-29 record last year influenced their voting in the preseason poll. The Matadors opened this season 0-8 before reversing direction.

“Generally speaking, I’m surprised,” Montana State Coach Dave Gantt said of Northridge’s conference start. “But I think we didn’t realize how quickly they could recruit kids.”

Under third-year Coach Lian Lu, the Matadors have revamped their lineup with three transfers--outside hitter Nancy Ma and middle blockers Allwyn Fitzpatrick and Getty Dimitrova--and freshman outside hitter Nicki Midwin. Only one player who started last season, senior setter Heather Hofmans, remains in the lineup.

Because of the change in personnel, coaches said it was difficult to gauge Northridge’s strength before the season and after a demanding nonconference schedule that included losses to three top-20 teams--San Diego State (twice), USC and Loyola Marymount.

“They were easy to overlook,” said Cal State Sacramento Coach Debby Colberg, whose team lost a five-game match to Northridge last Thursday.

Colberg, though, said based on years of competing against Northridge at the NCAA Division II level, she expected the Matadors to be improved. Colberg is in her 21st season at Sacramento, which was picked to finish first in this, its first season in the Big Sky.

“I think I was the only one who was looking out for them,” Colberg said. “I knew they were going to be better. . . . They’ve done some good recruiting in the past year to strengthen their team.”

Northridge’s foreign connection has drawn the most raves. Coaches cited the additions of Ma, a 6-foot-1 sophomore from Zheng Zhou University in China, and Dimitrova, a 6-4 Bulgarian from the College of Southern Utah, for injecting an invaluable dose of power and consistency into the Matador scheme.

Ma set a Northridge match record with 34 kills against Sacramento last week, and Dimitrova entered the week tied for first in the conference with a .368 hitting percentage.

“They’re both real tough players,” Idaho State’s MacLachlan said. “They’re tall, physical and they play very strong at the net.”

Kelley Sliva, coach at Northern Arizona, said Ma and Dimitrova have made the biggest difference in a team the Lumberjacks defeated twice last season.

“When you have a foreign kid, that kid knows what to do at the right time,” Sliva said. “They’ve played at a high competitive level internationally. The game is easier for them.

“I coached a lot of foreign players [as an assistant at USC and Arizona]. They have no preconceived notion of who is supposed to be good. It’s not like they grew up thinking UCLA is supposed to be the best team in the country.”

Northridge assistant Kathleen O’Laughlin dismissed the notion that the Matadors’ recent success is because they play in an inferior conference.

“I don’t think it’s a weak conference, I think it’s a strong conference,” O’Laughlin said. “A lot of the [Big Sky] teams play a lot of ranked teams.

“We’re 6-0, but it’s been a battle. It hasn’t been a breeze by any means, and we still have 10 conference matches to go.”

Montana State’s Gantt agrees that it’s “way to early” for Northridge to make room in its trophy case.

“What they need to do is make a trip to Montana in November when it’s 20 below,” Gantt said.

The Matadors, who competed as an independent from 1990-95, last won a conference title in 1988, capping a string of six consecutive California Collegiate Athletic Assn. championships won under former Coach Walt Ker. Northridge won Division II titles in 1980, ’83 and ’87.

Unlike those days, when a conference title guaranteed an NCAA playoff berth, Northridge will not automatically qualify for the Division I playoffs if it wins the Big Sky championship. That honor goes to the winner of the conference tournament, played Nov. 22-23 at the school of the regular-season titlist.

“It definitely keeps everything in perspective,” O’Laughlin said of the tournament. “We have to prove ourselves all over again.”