Pitt Panthers Reach No. 1 in the Power 10: Izzy Starck’s Hands and the Defense Nobody Mentions

The most memorable moment of the first week of the NCAA women’s volleyball season was not on the scoresheet. It was in Izzy Starck’s hands. I still keep the habit of staying behind after the final whistle. When the stands in Pittsburgh begin to empty, I open my notebook and write down the things a box score never records: how a setter’s wrist closes after the third contact, where a middle blocker’s eyes go when she is subbed out, the breathing of a player who has just lost a rally nobody in the arena will remember. Volleyball is a sport of erased traces. The echo of an empty court always tells me what the scoreboard refuses to. The opening week of the NCAA women’s volleyball season is over. Pittsburgh entered it ranked sixth and left it ranked first in the Power 10 compiled by NCAA.com analyst Michella Chester. Four matches, four wins. Two of those wins came against teams inside the top fifteen, including Kentucky, which sat third at the time. Texas fell to ninth. Nebraska remained the team Chester called the most complete of the week. Those are clean numbers. But a perfect opening week is always a curtain over a longer story. Let me be clear, because I know plenty of readers skip this part. The Power 10 is not an official ranking. It is a weekly commentary product published by an analyst on NCAA.com, distinct from the coaches’ association poll. The No. 1 spot here buys reputation, attention and a small advantage in seeding conversations at the end of the season. It does not buy points, it does not buy a tournament berth, and it certainly does not buy a single victory. The American college women’s season runs past thirty matches. Four matches are a very thin slice: enough to impress, not enough to conclude. For readers new to the sport, allow me a few lines, because I have read too many sports pieces that assume everyone already knows everything. The setter orchestrates the entire offense: she decides who attacks, from where, and on what tempo. The outside hitter attacks on the left pin and usually has to pass in serve reception. The middle blocker attacks quickly at the net. A direct scoring attack is called a kill. And there is a concept the mainstream press routinely skips, though it is the real measure of a hitter: attack efficiency, meaning kills minus errors, divided by total attempts. A player can reach double-digit kills every match while her efficiency sits at an average level. Those two facts are not in conflict. Based on my experience tracking matches, this is precisely where box scores mislead the most. Start with one word: “limitless”. Chester used it to describe Pittsburgh’s offense under Starck, an attack that opponents cannot read. In volleyball, an offense earns that label when the setter spreads the ball to every hitter, front row and back row behind the three-metre line, quick tempo and pin tempo, and does it inside the same rally. Reaching that point demands a strict order of conditions: a perfect first contact, a setter’s feet arriving on time, and hitters willing to run plays that will never end with the ball in their hands. In other words, offensive variety is paid for in collective discipline, not in individual talent. Here I have to state plainly something the original commentary never raised. Not one reception metric appeared in the published data for Week 1. There is no perfect-pass rate, no dig count, no block total, no individual attempt or error figure. Every judgement about the quality of the system rests on a qualitative word: limitless. It is not wrong. It is not enough. I always add that note at the foot of my pieces, because data gaps are where a ranking is most likely to fail. Then comes the detail I consider most important, and the one the headlines dropped: Chester observed that Pitt’s defensive performance was even more striking than the offense. That sentence opens a different reading of Pittsburgh’s opening week. In volleyball, defence is not passivity. The block system at the net dictates where the ball deflects. The floor defenders behind it decide whether the ball lives again. And the instant the ball lives again is the instant of a transition attack, the kind of rally an opponent has not had time to organise its block around. If defence is Pitt’s real engine, then Olivia Babcock’s kills sit downstream of the system, not at its source. Put another way: the offense gets the headline, the defence wins the match. Babcock reached double-digit kills in all four opening matches. That is a signal of physical and role stability: she receives enough volume to be the primary weapon, and no opponent shut her down completely. But read that number properly. Volume consistency is not efficiency consistency. Twelve points on thirty attempts is not twenty points on thirty attempts. Without attempts and errors, we do not yet know which category Babcock belongs to, or whether Pitt’s offense is carrying her or she is carrying the offense. An outside hitter entering her second week of college volleyball usually meets something harder than week one: an opposing block coached specifically toward her favourite angle. Next week’s numbers will be tougher than this week’s. That is a rule, not a pessimistic forecast. The win over Kentucky is the heaviest fact of the week, and I want to give it exactly its weight. One match, one signal, one data point. Beating the third-ranked team carries genuine value in a postseason resume, because the selection committee weighs opponent quality rather than win totals alone. But one win is not a trend. A trend only appears when Pitt meets that calibre of opponent again, this time with a full scouting file on its setter in the opponent’s hands. This is where the Nebraska subplot becomes interesting. Chester still regards Nebraska as the most complete team, yet she handed No. 1 to Pittsburgh on the strength of the week’s results. That is the distinction between the team with the best results this week and the best team. The two can overlap, and usually they do not. College women’s volleyball is a field of programmes with historical depth, where a national title is built from years of recruiting rather than from one week in late August. And now the part I do not want to write but have to. Being No. 1 in the opening week is a tax, not a gift. Once your name sits at the top, every following opponent gains a free motivation, while you gain an extra week of being dissected. Starck’s distribution will be charted tendency by tendency: when she feeds the middle, when she turns to the back row, how she copes when the first contact drifts. The things that made the offense “limitless” in week one become a map by week five. There is a more counterintuitive angle still. A “limitless” offense is only truly limitless while the whole unit keeps that discipline. When an opposing block commits to a single hitter, the offense must narrow, and at that moment a setter’s real value lies not in how many options she has, but in how well she chooses when only a poor option remains. Week one could not answer that, because week one did not generate enough pressure. I also want to say something about how rankings like this operate inside the sports economy. A Power 10 is a media product: it converts fan emotion into page views, into broadcast attention, into commercial value for rights holders and for the platform that publishes it. That is not a scandal. But it has a familiar consequence: money and broadcast windows start shaping the narrative before technical data has had a chance to speak. The best matches of November usually arrive after the September rankings have been forgotten. And please do not turn this week into a fairy tale about a small side felling a giant. Pittsburgh is not a small side. It is a major programme with recruiting resources, facilities and a standing place among the elite of college women’s volleyball. The sweet narrative of the little team working miracles tends to bury one structural reality: the teams that climb to the top of the table are usually the ones that already have money, scholarships and a recruiting region. A moving story should not replace the structural question. As for this week’s defeated warriors, they are on the other side of the net, heads down, retying their laces once the match ends, knowing the ranking will not say their names. Those are the moments that keep me in the arena longer than I need to stay. Next week I will watch three things, and none of them is a ranking position. I will watch Babcock’s attack efficiency once detailed statistics are published, because it reveals whether she is carrying the offense or finishing rallies the defence has already cleaned up. I will watch how Starck distributes in the first set of a big match, when the opposing block is fresh and has done its homework. And I will watch the defence, where Chester placed the most important mark of this week. The stands are empty, yet I still hear ten thousand hearts keeping time, even in early-season gyms where nobody knows yet who this season belongs to. A long season always keeps room for ashes. From the ashes of a defeat I plant the seed of healing, but every team must taste one defeat before it understands who it is. What I am waiting for: when Pitt stands on that summit in a week where nothing runs smoothly, will its defence still be the place it finds itself?