After a record season and a five-set heartbreak, Schreiner volleyball heads home to the ASC

Schreiner volleyball had split the first four sets of the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference championship match, two apiece, when it walked back onto its own floor at the Mountaineer Event Center for a deciding fifth on Nov. 15. A conference title the program had never won was one set away.

The Mountaineers had swept Hendrix in the semifinal a day earlier, 3-0, to get there. Colorado College was waiting, and for four sets the two teams played some of the best volleyball either had seen all year. Colorado College took the fifth set too, and with it the championship, 3-2.

It was the kind of loss that could define a season. Instead, Schreiner is trying to make it the reason for the next one.

“It was really heartbreaking. We were all pretty silent. There were lots of tears,” senior setter Harlie Gallaspy said. “We really thought we were going to do it. It was more of just saying goodbye to our seniors — it wasn’t necessarily about the game. It was just how happy we were with our season, and how sad we were that our seniors were going to be leaving.”

The season that ended in that locker room was, by any measure available, the best in the program’s recent history. Schreiner finished 24-7, its most single-season wins on record, and reached a conference final for the first time under fifth-year coach Jeremiah Tiffin. The five-set loss to Colorado College was close enough that Tiffin has refused to let his team be bitter about it.

“If we’re at 65%, we’re doing great. We started out at 79% in the first four sets and only won two of them,” Tiffin said. “That’s the high level of play that was going on there. You can’t be upset because of how good they played, and you can’t be upset because of how good we played.”

A new conference, and an old one

Schreiner will chase that breakthrough this fall in a different league altogether. The Mountaineers are rejoining the American Southwest Conference for the 2026-27 season, ending a 13-season run in the SCAC that began in 2013. It’s a homecoming in the fullest sense: the ASC is the conference Schreiner joined in 1998, the same year the university moved its athletics program into NCAA Division III, and the only one it competed in for 15 years before leaving for the SCAC. The move back — announced last year alongside a similar return by McMurry University — restores rivalries older than the program’s current roster and gives the ASC the six-member core it needs to keep its automatic bid to the NCAA Division III tournament.

For a team that just won more matches than any Schreiner squad before it, the return to the ASC does not come with a discount. The preseason coaches’ poll picked the Mountaineers to finish fourth, and Tiffin isn’t arguing with it.

“I understand why they put us fourth, and that’s just fuel for us, and the girls know it,” Tiffin said. “We’re excited to go ahead and play those teams and show them that maybe we can be better than fourth.”

The skepticism has a paper trail. Schreiner has not beaten Hardin-Simmons in a match during Tiffin’s tenure — an 0-4 mark across his four seasons, confirmed against the Lead’s own results archive — and has beaten Mary Hardin-Baylor only once in that same span, a 3-1 win in 2024. East Texas Baptist, another ASC anchor, spent last season ranked No. 1 in the country, according to Tiffin.

Hilliard, a senior outside hitter, doesn’t hear the fourth-place prediction as an insult so much as a sign of how far the program has come.

“We’re not underdogs anymore. People know who we are. People know what we can bring,” Hilliard said. “They’re going to put a little more weight on our name essentially, and not just take us for granted.”

The returners

If Schreiner is going to make the preseason poll look conservative, it will lean on the two players most responsible for last year’s numbers. Hilliard led the team in kills (363), digs (353) and total points (400.0) a season ago. Gallaspy ran the offense from setter, finishing with 618 assists and a team-high 47 service aces. Both are seniors, both start every season alongside fellow senior Mackenzie Strban, and all three are exercise science majors who plan to apply to physical therapy school together after graduation.

Tiffin frames his team’s identity around speed, not power — a preference he explains in football terms.

“We’re stronger offensively because we bring back all of our setters, and that’s such a huge thing,” Tiffin said. “We’re trying to basically run a four-wide-receiver offense and keep it up-tempo. We’re not ready to get into an I formation and slow it down.”

The signature play in that offense is the “go” — a quick set to the outside hitter, designed to beat the block before it forms.

“I like to run a go, which is a quicker-tempo set, because normally middles don’t have enough time to get there and close the block,” Hilliard said. “It doesn’t matter how it’s done as long as it gets done.”

Gallaspy calls it her favorite set to run, too: “It’s really fast, and if it works out just right, it’s perfect.”

Getting there requires trust between Gallaspy and fellow setter Gaby Torres, who split ball-handling duties and, by Hilliard’s account, complement each other — Torres brings a hustle mentality and a sense of humor that eases tension on the court, while Gallaspy “gets her hands to every ball” and looks for chances to reverse the flow of a rally. When a play breaks down, the team’s answer is what Tiffin calls the “next ball” mentality: get through the point in front of you, then move on.

“There’s no one else better right now,” Hilliard said, describing what she tells a teammate having a rough set. “You are here on this court for a reason. Coach put you out here. We all trust you.”

Gallaspy’s path to the position she now runs wasn’t obvious. She didn’t make varsity until her junior year of high school, and didn’t play setter until that same year, when her coach needed someone athletic to replace a graduating starter. Hilliard’s own arc ran the other direction — a front-row-only freshman who became a full six-rotation player by her sophomore year, then, by her junior season, developed what she calls a “goldfish mentality” for shaking off mistakes in the middle of a match.

What’s coming in

Five freshmen join the roster this fall: outside hitters Jessa Smith and Hannah Simpson, utility players Kaleia Butler and Danica McGarity, and defensive specialist Cloe Baltazar. Simpson will also compete for Schreiner’s brand-new sand volleyball program, one of three women’s sports — alongside flag football and swimming — the university added this year as it builds out its ASC-era athletics department.

Tiffin recruited the class the way he says the program recruits every year now: through the depth of prep and club volleyball in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas, a talent pool he says increasingly produces players who could play Division II but choose Division III instead.

“It’s players that give us depth that can push our returners, but have been in situations where things have not been easy and they’ve had to earn them,” Tiffin said.

Both Tiffin and Gallaspy pushed back on the idea that Division III is a consolation prize.

“I think it’s just as good as D-II, at least,” Gallaspy said. “I think D-III is still up there, and it allows you to kind of have your own life as well, instead of volleyball, volleyball, volleyball all the time.”

Tiffin pointed to a new NCAA rule limiting Division I roster sizes as one reason the level of play keeps rising beneath it. “It’s created a bottleneck,” he said, pushing talent down into Division II and III and making the game “so much more exciting” at every level.

Home

Hilliard grew up in San Antonio, close enough that she could drive home most weekends if she wanted to. She doesn’t.

“When people ask me if I go home, I’m like, no, I don’t really go home,” Hilliard said. “It’s not because I don’t like my family or anything. It’s just that I’ve grown a family here that I want to spend as much time with and enjoy throughout my college years while I am.”

That is the team Schreiner is sending into the ASC this fall — the most experienced roster in program history, in Tiffin’s own estimation, carrying a five-set loss it has chosen to treat as unfinished business rather than a ceiling.