Gazelles Daily Roundup - December 18 2009

Gazelles win!  And just like their counterparts in football, Texas moves on to play the #1 team in the country for the National Championship.

Texas had an easy time of it, taking out Minnesota in a sweep.

The ease with which the Longhorns (29-1) moved the ball around and spread the wealth made the victory seem methodical.

It wasn't.

It was domination.

The Horns now face Penn State, who surprisingly dropped a set before taking out pint-sized Hawai'i in the second match of the night.

I'll have a position-by-position analysis in tomorrow's GDR. These two teams are practically a mirror image of each other.

Gophers had matchup issues. If you focus your defense on Destinee, then Juliann, Jen or Ashley will make you pay.

Engle, a 6-3 lefthanded, setter/hitter, presented matchup problems for the Gophers, who often pitted 5-10 Hailey Cowles against her. Cowles led the Gophers with 12 kills and added two service aces.

"She's a tiger of a player, but to have her matched up against Engle for two rotations, we knew that wasn't going to bode well for us," Hebert said.

The Gophers had to be perfect to have any hope of pulling the upset.  They weren't.

"In order to compete with Texas, we had to serve a little better than we did," Minnesota coach Mike Hebert said. "We had to serve a little bit tougher and play a little bit better defense. I thought we were often confident in all three of those areas, but there were too many moments when we didn't do it well enough and they have the athletes to take advantage of any mistake and they did."