Penn State Women’s Volleyball Head Coach Russ Rose has made it clear that all of this talk about a “three-peat” for Penn State (winning a third consecutive NCAA National Championship) misses the point. For Rose, the focus is on who will replace AVCA National Player of the Year Nicole Fawcett, two-time AVCA First Team All-American Christa Harmotto, and starting libero Roberta Holehouse.

On that question, Rose is playing it pretty close to the vest sweater. As he told Gordon Brunskill in an interview posted today on centredaily.com, “If I had to put my lineup in, I’d be putting it in pencil.”

In his interview with Brunskill, Rose sounds a bit nostalgic for the good old days — 2008. “We maybe didn’t call more than 20 timeouts all year. . . . I may call 20 timeouts this weekend. I’ve got to do a lot more talking this year in preseason than I’ve had to do the last couple years.”

We’ll know more about who’s playing what position, and how much time each player is on the court, when the Nittany Lions take on Miami University at 5:00 p.m. CT at Chaifetz Arena in the opening match of the Active Ankle Invitational (Penn State will also face Alabama and St. Louis University). The match will be available on GameTracker.

Here are our previews for the Miami, Alabama, and St. Louis matches.

We’ll be on a no-computer trip until Sunday, when we’ll post a write-up of the results, including individual Attack, Block/Pts., Receipt/Dig, and Serve Statistics (see the links on the toolbar above).