Pitt volleyball releases 2021 schedule

The Pitt volleyball team is gearing up for another year returning most of their top ten team from a year ago. This week, the Panthers released their schedule for next season.

The season will start in a little more than a month on August 21 with a road exhibition against Cincinnati. The season opener will be the following weekend on August 27 against Rice. Here’s the full schedule.

While the ACC portion of the schedule is not as difficult as the ones in the Big 12 or Big Ten, Pitt’s schedule is another challenging on as they’ve loaded up in the non-conference portion. The two ‘biggies’ are Baylor and BYU — both top 15 teams from last year. Washington State and Rice are also two additional teams that were ranked last year.

Three more 2020-21 ranked teams await Pitt in conference in Notre Dame, Louisville, and Georgia Tech. The Panthers will face the Cardinals and Yellow Jackets twice, giving them a total of nine ranked teams from last year.

Also on the schedule are High Point, Bowling Green, and Morehead State. Those teams didn’t finish the season ranked but all reached the NCAA Tournament last year.

It’s a solid schedule and assuming the ACC has some ranked teams throughout the year, that would help. It would have been nice to see Pitt and Penn State play again as they’ve done a few times recently. To me, that’s the one match missing that would really add some intrigue to the schedule.

With both programs playing so well, that would be a marquee match that would have the eyes of the entire country and it could really develop into a good rivalry. But it’s still nice to see the Panthers add some quality non-conference opponents to help the RPI and Strength of Schedule.

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