Sjarif Goldstein: Hawaii's back-to-back national championships are a cut above the others
May 9—The most impressive part of the University of Hawaii men's volleyball team's repeat as national champions might be that, in a sense, it was not really a repeat.
Much has been made of the fact that the Rainbow Warriors on Saturday became the fifth program in a row to win back-to-back titles. But Hawaii's pair of trophies were earned with a higher degree of difficulty than the other schools' were.
UC Irvine started the trend. When the Anteaters won in 2012, they were led by first-team All-Americans Carson Clark and Kevin Tillie. The latter returned in 2013 and UCI won another title.
Loyola Chicago won the championship in 2014 behind first-teamer Thomas Jaeschke. The next year, Jaeschke was back and the Ramblers went all the way again as he won the national Player of the Year honor.
In 2016, it was Ohio State's turn. All-Americans Miles Johnson and Nicolas Szerszen, the national Player of the Year, took the Buckeyes the distance. Both came back and led OSU to another championship.
In 2018, Long Beach State had three All-Americans—TJ DeFalco, Kyle Ensing and Josh Tuaniga—on their NCAA title team. The Beach /49ers ran it back with all three the next season and won it all again. That Beach troika was so talented that it totaled three straight national top player honors, DeFalco sandwiching Tuaniga's 2018 award with two of his own.
Which brings us to the loaded 2021 Rainbow Warriors, with three first-team All-Americans in Gage Worsley, Patrick Gasman and national Player of the Year Rado Parapunov, plus second-team All-American Colton Cowell. All four were gone after the season. The Hawaii team that swept Long Beach State for the title this weekend was almost completely different from the one that broomed BYU in the 2021 final.
Those four players provided nearly 70 % of UH's kills, nearly two-thirds of its points and digs and more than half its blocks and aces. None of the prior back-to-backers underwent anywhere near that kind of turnover.
Credit obviously goes to coach Charlie Wade and his staff (aloha, Josh Walker !) for having that level of talent lined up, developing players such as Guilherme Voss, Brett Sheward and Spyros Chakas (among many ) into more prominent roles than they had a year earlier, preparing the team for matches all year long and keeping expectations high.
But setter Jakob Thelle also deserves a huge chunk of praise. A volleyball team's setter already has a quarterback-like role in directing the offense, and Thelle adapted from an attack that revolved around Parapunov to one slightly more diverse. Parapunov averaged 16 % more kill attempts per set than 2022's leader and 22 % more kills per set.
That 2022 leader in kills per set was Dimitrios Mouchlias, whom Wade had stashed away in Greece rehabbing his ankles after playing a supporting role on the 2020 team that never got a chance to see if it could win Hawaii's second national championship. (Sorry, NCAA, but I still count that 2002 title you say has been vacated due to a ridiculous technicality.)
Yes, the Rainbow Warriors lost the bulk of their nucleus, but they got back Mouchlias, and he deserves a little extra kudos as well for working so hard to come back from what would seem to be a career-threatening battery of injuries for a volleyball player. We can only imagine how hard Mouchlias worked—and what great care the training staff provided—to come back as strong as he did.
But, hold on, we're not done heaping praise on Thelle yet. Besides his leadership and ability to adapt his setting to a new set of weapons, he also brought a new weapon of his own to the court. I mentioned above that among what UH lost from its 2021 team was more than half its aces. And yet, the Rainbow Warriors actually had more aces per set than a year earlier—up to 1.96 from 1.58. Thelle made up most of that deficit himself, with a program-record 61 aces this season, up from just 19 in 2021. His aces per set doubled.
Ten of Thelle's aces came in the three NCAA Tournament wins. Add up his contributions and you can't help but wonder if maybe this is another example of the practice of handing out player of the year awards based on regular-season performance being flawed. As impressive as LBSU's Alex Nikolov was this season, did he mean as much to his team's success as Thelle did ? It seems like that answer might have changed this weekend.
