The Hole in a 36-1 Team
UC volleyball returns 78% of its offense. What’s missing is harder to replace than what’s back.
Thirty-six wins. One loss. Twelve conference matches, twelve conference wins. Thirteen home dates without dropping a match, twelve road dates the same. The 2025 University of the Cumberlands volleyball team spent three months turning opponents into rounding errors: a .312 team hitting percentage against .103 for everybody else, 309 aces to 83, and a stretch from late September into November where they won nineteen straight matches and lost a grand total of two sets.
Then, on December 5, it ended 24-26, 25-20, 22-25, 25-17, 8-15 against McPherson.
The question hanging over 2026 isn’t whether this program can be good again. It’s narrower and more interesting than that: the Patriots kept fourteen of twenty-one players, including their setter and both primary pin hitters, and still walked away from the offseason with two specific problems that no amount of returning volume solves.
What came back
Start with the number that frames everything else. Of the 1,675 kills UC put down last season, 1,308 return. That’s 78.1%. Total attacks return at 80.3%, points at 76.9%, assists at a staggering 92.1%.
For a program at this level, that’s not a good returning class. That’s essentially the same team.
The assist figure is the one to sit with. Savanah Jolly is back for her senior season after handing out 1,208 assists at 10.98 per set, and she wasn’t just a distributor. She added 105 kills of her own on .422 hitting, which would lead most rosters in efficiency outright. A returning senior setter who already knows every hitter’s tempo is the single most valuable thing a team can have in August, and UC has one.
She’ll be setting the same people, too.
Sara Zampedri, back for a graduate year, led the team in kills (420), points (508.5), and aces (76) while also picking up 324 digs, a six-rotation player in every sense. Brynnley Bryant returns as a junior after 387 kills, 431 points, and 293 digs of her own. Between them: 807 kills from the pins, both back.
Alana Shiery is the third piece, and arguably the most important one. Her 237 kills came at .385, and she posted 68.0 block credit, the highest on the roster. A 6-2 junior middle who hits near .400 and blocks like that is the kind of player who quietly decides matches.
What didn’t
Here’s where the preview stops being a victory lap.
Kara Gipson hit .482. Not for a match, not for a weekend. For a season, across 440 attacks. She put down 248 kills, added 83 total blocks, and scored 297.5 points. On a team that hit .312 as a group, she was operating in a different weight class, and there is nobody on the 2026 roster who has done anything close to that.
Gipson graduated after the season and has moved on to another school, where she isn’t playing volleyball. There’s no eligibility asterisk here, no waiting to see how a transfer portal situation resolves. That production is simply gone.
This is the difference between losing production and losing efficiency. You can replace 248 kills by giving somebody else 440 swings. You cannot replace what those swings did to opposing defenses. When Gipson was a live option in the middle, opposing blockers had to honor her, and Zampedri and Bryant got cleaner looks on the outside. That gravity is gone.
The second departure is louder on the stat sheet and, in some ways, easier to solve.
Davey Slaughter took 500 digs with her, 25.5% of the entire team’s total, along with 71 aces, 112 assists, and 4.31 digs per set. She’s not far away; she’s listed on the 2026 staff as a Graduate Assistant. But she’s not passing serve anymore, and she was absorbing an enormous share of it: 18 of the team’s 83 reception errors came from a player who was clearly seeing the most balls.
Who fills it
The libero job is the more open competition of the two.
Autiana Wilson is the obvious front-runner. As a freshman she played 118 sets, put up 241 digs at 2.04 per set, and served 41 aces. Kendall Yarber, a senior, matched her ace total across the same 118 sets. Neither carried Slaughter’s volume, but both have been on the floor in high-leverage matches, which matters more than raw numbers in a serve-receive rebuild.
Behind them, UC added Josie Newcom, a 5-11 junior transfer from Murray State who can play out of the back row or the pin, and freshman Morgan Bentel out of DeForest, Wisconsin. Digs return at 70.5% and aces at 75.7%, thinner than the offensive figures and the first place to look if the Patriots stumble early.
The middle is the more consequential competition, because that’s where the .482 hole is.
Shiery anchors it. Elaina Fischer returns as a sophomore after 115 kills on .300 and 61 total blocks in only 85 sets. The per-set block rate (0.72) was identical to Gipson’s, which is the most encouraging single data point in this whole exercise. Faith Franklin adds a junior body, and 6-2 freshman Zuzanna Wolszewska arrives from Kraków with real size.
Blocking returns at 69.3%, the lowest of the major categories.
The new name
Martina Frangella comes to Williamsburg as a junior middle by way of Midland College, listed at 6-1 out of Santa Fe, Argentina. Her 2025-26 line: 170 kills, 1.72 per set, 234.0 points across 27 matches.
The percentage is the thing to be honest about. She hit .162 on 500 attacks. UC hit .312 as a team. Frangella took a lot of swings and converted them at a rate well below what this offense produced last season, and it’s worth being clear that she is not a like-for-like answer to what Gipson did.
That’s not a knock. It’s a read. Junior college volume hitters often see their efficiency jump substantially when they move into a system with a returning senior setter and two pins that command attention. Frangella arrives as size, physicality, and a fourth or fifth option in a crowded middle rotation. If the percentage climbs into the .250s in this offense, UC’s front-row problem gets a lot smaller.
The schedule
Start with the arithmetic, correctly. Last season’s 36-1 included five postseason matches: two in the Mid-South Conference tournament, three in the NAIA bracket. Strip those out and the 2025 regular season was 32 matches long and UC won all 32. The 2026 slate is also 32 matches. Same length, same shape, and the only honest baseline is an undefeated regular season.
Fourteen of those 32 are conference matches. The other 18 are where the season gets decided, and the schedule front-loads the difficulty in a way last year’s did not.
Three ranked opponents appear, all three in non-conference play, and all three away from Williamsburg: IU Kokomo (No. 13) on the road August 28, Mount Vernon Nazarene (No. 9) on a neutral floor the next morning, and Aquinas (No. 17) at Lima on September 26. UC beat both Kokomo and Aquinas last season, but neither was comfortable. Kokomo went 25-23, 25-21, 26-24, and Aquinas took a set 28-26. Those were three-set wins with Gipson in the middle and Slaughter passing.
Six more matches come against teams receiving votes: Texas Wesleyan in the opener at Keiser, Columbia International at the Cumberlands Invite, and home-and-home sets with both Lindsey Wilson and Cumberland (Tenn.).
The conference itself is not the problem. UC went 12-0 in league play last year and did it by an absurd margin, closing out Bethel (Tenn.) 25-13, 25-13, 25-13 and Georgetown 25-11, 25-12, 25-18. Nothing in the returning production suggests that changes much.
The prediction
29-3 in the regular season, 13-1 in conference.
The three projected losses sit in the August and September non-conference stretch, where all three ranked opponents fall inside a five-week window and where a new libero will be learning serve receive in real time against the best servers UC sees all year. The Kokomo and Mount Vernon Nazarene matches land on back-to-back days in the same tournament, roughly two weeks into the season. That is the hardest weekend on the calendar and it arrives before this group has settled.
The one conference loss is the honest acknowledgment that road matches at Lindsey Wilson, Campbellsville, and Cumberland (Tenn.) are the kind of environments where a team missing a .482 middle can drop a set cluster it would have survived a year ago.
The case for the over is Jolly. A returning senior setter with 92% of the assists coming back is the most reliable predictor of early-season stability there is, and if Fischer’s block rate holds and Frangella’s percentage climbs even modestly, this runs closer to 31-1.
The case for the under is narrower but real: if serve receive does not stabilize by late September, the ranked non-conference matches become losses rather than tests, and a team this dependent on in-system efficiency starts hitting well below .312.
Worth noting where the voters landed. UC opens the season ranked No. 10 despite the best record in the country last year, behind seven teams it never played. That is a schedule-strength judgment more than a talent judgment, and it means the late-August results will do more to shape this team’s postseason position than anything that happens in October.
Our take
Twenty-nine and three is a projection built from a spreadsheet. Here is what we actually think.
Any number with losses in it looks like a slide after an undefeated regular season, and this will be anything but a slide. Most of this team is back. What left is hard to replace, and we have said so plainly. But hard is not impossible, and there are two things a projection cannot price.
The first is Frangella. Volume hitters who arrive from junior college with a middling percentage and land in a system with a senior setter have a way of becoming different players by October. She may be a star in the making, and if she is, the front-row math stops being a problem entirely.
The second is the freshman class, which we think is the most underrated thing about this roster. There is a case that the best freshman in the country is on it. Development is unpredictable and we will find out in real time, but the ceiling here is considerably higher than the returning-production tables suggest.
What we are confident in is this. They will win the Mid-South again. They will host and win an NAIA opening round. They will make another run, and they may make a deeper one than last year’s. This is the best coaching staff in the country, and the UC Volleyball Gym is a fortress. UC went 13-0 at home in 2025 and did not drop a single home set worth remembering.
They were slept on all of last season and under-ranked the entire way. Opening at No. 10 after going 32-0 in the regular season suggests that trend is going to hold. That is fine. It worked out reasonably well the last time.
The read
Set the expectations honestly. This is not a team facing a rebuild, and framing it that way would be silly: 78% of the kills, 92% of the assists, both outsides, and the setter all walked back through the door in August.
But 36-1 teams don’t get graded on whether they’ll be good. They get graded on whether they can be that good again, and the two things standing in the way are specific: a middle who hit .482 and a libero who took a quarter of the digs. One of those is now on the coaching staff. The other graduated and has stopped playing.
Everything else is intact. Whether it’s enough depends almost entirely on how fast Wilson settles into serve receive and whether Fischer, Wolszewska, or Frangella can turn into the front-row threat that keeps opposing blockers honest.
Call it 29-3, and expect the number to look conservative by November. The Patriots open Friday morning against Goshen in West Palm Beach, and the answers start arriving two weeks after that.
*Win-loss projection and the opinions in “Our take” are this publication’s own, not a UC or conference forecast. Stats via the 2025 University of the Cumberlands season statistics report (final, Dec. 5, 2025) and the 2026 Patriots roster. Frangella’s numbers via Midland College, 2025-26. Schedule and rankings via UC Athletics and the NAIA Coaches’ Top 25.