Then you would have the historic-making event that took place Wednesday night at the Beacom/Lewis Gymnasium on the Central State campus.
The University of Southern California, the No. 6 men’s volleyball team in the nation with a front line that can be 6-foot-11, 6-foot-11 and 6-foot-10, came to play CSU, which is just beginning its fourth season as a program and whose tallest player was a 6-foot-6 sub.
But it was significance — not size — that mattered most on this night. It was the first time that a Power 4 conference team has ever come to any HBCU campus to play a volleyball match.
USC’s Riley Hain, a 6-foot-6 redshirt sophomore from Hawaii, summed it up best:
“I’m happy we could be a part of making history tonight. That was cool. And playing here was fun. We’ve never seen anything like this before in a gym.”
And while CSU had no slingshot to fell the mighty Trojans, who won in three straight sets — 25-11, 25-15, 25-14 — the Marauders did manage to catch the attention of their powerhouse opponents.
Wednesday night’s victory was the 900th in program history for USC, which is 4-0 and on its way to play in the Big Ten Challenge at Ohio State this weekend. It meets Ohio State tonight and Penn State on Saturday.
By contrast, Central State — which dropped to 0-4 this season — has 40 career wins.
But the Marauders will be getting more and more victories, said USC’s celebrated coach, Jeff Nygaard.
After the match he met with CSU’s new coach Devin Walker and gave him a compliment.
“I told him that was a lot of good blocking out there by his guys,” said Nygaard, a three-time Olympian and two-time NCAA champ who’s in his 10th year with the Trojans.
“Blocking is the hardest skill to get down, so if you’re doing that at the net against a fast team that runs a fast offense — and you’re able to read it, to see it — those are good fundamentals and it’s something you can build on.
“They have a lot of athletes, and that a big piece of the puzzle. If they keep going like they did tonight, they’re going to get better and better every single time they play.”
Walker — who just took over CSU’s men’s and women’s programs five months ago and now is assisted by Candace Lunford — hopes Nygaard’s praise helps fuel his team into the rest of its schedule and especially when it gets to matches in their Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
More than just wins and losses for CSU, Wednesday’s match-up, as Lunford put it quite candidly, was about growing a program in a sport which has been “a rich, white sport in the past.”
“This is about opportunities to make an impact with young men and young women who look like me and many of whom come from similar backgrounds as me,” she said.
“And it’s about being a part of a program that can make a dynamic impact in a community that’s ready and hungry for growth and opportunity.”
“It’s about the chance,” Walker said, “to say ‘We are here!’”
‘We can be a good team’
The Marauders were looking forward to USC coming to their gym, Walker said:
“If we had a calendar in our locker room, they probably would have circled it in red, made it bold and highlighted it. The guys' excitement level was high for this opportunity.”
The two teams actually played last year at the Galen Center, across the street from the USC campus in Los Angeles. The Trojans won that one: 25-13; 25-12; 25-16.
Over the years CSU — which is considered a Division I program at the men’s level and Division II with its women’s team — has played other major powers on the road.
In 2022, the first year of the program, the Marauders played twice at Ohio State — both 0-3 losses — but stunned everyone when they went on to win the SIAC Tournament. In 2023, they played at Ohio State and Penn State, where they won one set.
Last year CSU went on the road to play eight top 25 teams, including No. 2 Long Beach State, No. 6 Penn State and No. 12 USC.
Nygaard sees these kinds of matchups as a chance to help grow the sport and your brand at the same time.
Initially, CSU was chosen as one of six HBCUs in the nation — all of them in the SIAC — to share the $1 million donated to predominantly black schools by USA Volleyball and the First Point Volleyball Foundation, which nurtures the sport at the youth, high school and college level.
The inaugural 2022 team — coached by Ray Lewis — went 14-13 and took the SIAC tournament crown.
When Lewis left to coach Merrimack, Dr. Anitra Brockman took over the program for two seasons and the Marauders went 17-15 and 9-27. She then left to start the program at Maryland Eastern Shore.
The new staff of Walker and Lunford inherited just two players who have been with the program all four seasons: opposite hitter Tyrone Sands from Nassau, Bahamas, and middle blocker Alain Tamo-Noche from Pittsburgh.
“It feels different this year,” Tamo-Noche said. “We have a lot of new guys and our coaches truly care. We can be a good team.”
USC leads the nation in blocks per set (3.62) and CSU struggled and finished with a .127 hitting percentage.
There were some shining moments, though.
Walter praised the efforts Toulmin “Quad” Williams IV, who had eight kills, five digs and lifted his team throughout the match.
Nygaard praised the athleticism of high leapers like Williams and Tamo-Noche. The CSU roster is primarily made up of freshmen and sophomores, with just a few transfers.
There are four players from the Miami Valley, including Wednesday’s starting setter, Adam Sheppard, a Fairmont High graduate who now lives in Sidney and transferred this season from Bethel University, a small NAIA school in Indiana.
“For my first start to be against USC in this atmosphere was crazy,” said Sheppard, who had 20 assists. “To play a top 10 team with a 7-foot middle (hitter) is crazy. They are big.”
USC had 12 players who were 6-foot-6 or taller, seven of them were 6-8 or taller.
Central State had 6-foot-6 Bradley Patrick, a freshman from Middletown.
But when it comes to memories of the night, the USC size was eclipsed by CSU scene.
‘Tonight was the best experience’
When Miss Central State left her king — Aisayah Akers, of Garden City, California — grabbed a microphone and belted out the anthem, Hain, USC’s outside hitter, was impressed:
“It was cool to see the king and queen come in and then the anthem — she can really sing!”
As for the CSU cheerleaders, they were set up in the stands just a few feet behind the USC bench for sets 1 and 3 and a couple of them took turns dancing right behind the team during timeout huddles. That produced a predicament for more than one Trojan backup whose attention to Nygaard suddenly waned at times.
Walker said this was all a part of an effort to introduce a sport to a campus best known — as the banners hanging in Beacom/Lewis attest — for football, basketball and track.
“Tonight was the best experience I’ve had here in my four years with the team,” Sands said.
The only thing that was missing — besides a few more fans — was the rattle-the-rafters pep band, which is part of the Marauders’ famed Marching 100 band.
In years past, when the pep band gets ripping through one high-decibel song after another, it would get so loud in the gym that opposing basketball coaches sometimes had to move their time-out huddles to the middle of the court so they could be heard.
“Yeah, I hope our band is here for the next game,” said Tamo-Noche.
The Marauders host Wabash College tonight.
“I’m hoping we can make that happen,” Walker said. “The band would add to the whole scene.”
And when you have a brass section with some mighty lungs and a percussion line with a lot of drums, you don’t need a slingshot and stones.
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