ON AN UNSEASONABLY warm October afternoon, Pitt volleyball coach Dan Fisher walks into the Panthers locker room in search of a second opinion. His sandy-blonde hair is combed to perfection and he's dressed in a light-blue shirt and navy dress pants.
"What do you think of the blue on blue?" Fisher asks, tugging at the end of his right sleeve with his left fingers.
The ukulele-playing, cough-drop-sucking coach knows details matter when you're trying to join an exclusive club that has admitted exactly three new members in the past three decades. Pitt has come agonizingly close to joining the group of NCAA volleyball champions in each of the past three seasons but has been denied. This season, the Panthers are ranked No. 1 for the first time in program history, and are steadfast in their belief they won't fall short again.
Among the players assessing their coach's attire from their lockers is Olivia Babcock, a sophomore with a thunderous jump serve and a lightning-quick spike. There, too, is All-American Rachel Fairbanks, a setter with hands as precise as a surgeon's. And then there's Valeria Vazquez Gomez, a sixth-year senior who has shepherded the squad from grateful tournament invitee to three-time national semifinalist to, unbelievably, favorite.
The Panthers are 103 minutes away from playing nine-time national champion Stanford, a team they've faced four times before and lost every time. A win would be another historic first for the program.
The players give their coach a collective thumbs-up on his outfit before the light mood turns serious.
"We need to be in hunter mindset," Fisher says, his gaze piercing. "We're getting closer to the tournament -- this is the kind of team we need to be able to beat if we want to go deep."
Then Stanford emerges on a projector screen at the far end of the room. The players sit up tall. They watch clips of the Cardinal, pausing each time setter Kami Miner jumps in the air. They guess where she's going to set the ball. "Outside." "Slide." "Dump." They're on point. Once they're done, the team looks at Fisher expectantly.
He tells them to trust their senses. In a hunt, details matter. Instinct matters.
"We've done a lot of work, we've watched a lot of video this week," Fisher says. "The reason is so we don't have to think in game -- just trust what you see, that's way better than what's on a paper."
Associate head coach Kellen Petrone takes over for the "rehearsal."
Players close their eyes and place their palms on their thighs. Petrone asks them to take a deep breath. He's reading from a script he put together on his phone.
"Check in with your mood," he says. "Check in with your arousal level."
Amped. Ready for this, Babcock thinks.
"Think about where you want to be when the game starts."
Hunter mindset. -- Fairbanks
"Replay some great plays you've made this year."
Georgia Tech. Feeling invincible. -- Babcock
Penn State. Everything was flowing. -- Fairbanks
"Visualize the court, visualize everything you're seeing."
Bright lights. Flood of Pitt fans. The band playing "Hot to Go." -- Vazquez Gomez
"The game is starting. Let's go through some of those first touches."
Fairbanks twitches. Like her body is reacting to her brain as it focuses on the moment.
"It's 25-25 in the first set. Go through a rally in which you win the point. Go through another rally."
Perfect pass. Fairbanks set. Babcock kill. -- Vazquez Gomez
"We're 24-22 in the fourth set. Go through the match-winning rally. See the group coming together in the end."
Running to each other. Hugs. High-fives. Chest bumps. -- Fairbanks
"Breathe in and out," Petrone says. "And, when you're done, open your eyes."
They take a collective inhale.
One after the other, they run out of the locker room. They make a circle on the court. They go around, doing a roll call. "Yeah, Rachel," "Let's go V," they scream. Each person dances in the center of the circle.
The hunt is on.
IN 1787, WHEN the University of Pittsburgh became one of the first universities in North America, panthers roamed the Pennsylvania hills. The large cats stealthily hunted deer and raccoons and porcupines in the forests around the forts that would come to be known as "Steel City." The powerful predators were long gone from the area, migrating south, when Pitt adopted the Panther as its mascot in 1909.
The Pitt volleyball program was founded in 1974, and the panther's hunter mindset is paramount to the program today. Over the years, players have engaged in organized exercises to visualize themselves as predators and incorporated their tactics into Pitt's style of play. Setters run a quick-strike offense. Hitters swing high and hard. Blockers elevate big and bold. They pummel their serves and control the pace and emotion of the game. They are loud when they take the court and loud during points. There is no hesitation. Tipping is taboo.
Players point to the 2023 regional final against Louisville, to a moment when Pitt trailed its ACC rival two sets to none, as an example.
During the break, Babcock made eye contact with Vazquez Gomez and Torrey Stafford, an outside hitter with the second-most kills to Babcock. Wordlessly, the three exited their sold-out home gym and made their way to the women's bathroom next to the main entrance. They needed to get away from the bright lights and the thousands of eyeballs.
They had five minutes before the third set.
They shut the bathroom door and formed a circle, clasping each other's hands. Their eyes focused on the gray floor.
"One, two, three," one of them muttered. They don't remember who.
A guttural scream followed. It grew louder and louder until they felt like their insides were shaking. Several seconds passed. They continued, the bellow echoing across the bathroom.
At exactly the same time, Fairbanks ran to the Pitt locker room to do the same thing. She screamed and screamed until she couldn't hear her own thoughts.
When they ran out of breath, they slowed down, then stopped entirely. They took a deep breath and shook their heads. With their ears ringing, they made their way back to the court.
"We looked at each other, and we're like there's no way we aren't winning this game," Fairbanks says.
Fisher had no idea the players had gone off to scream -- a practice he learned from an Eastern European coach back in his playing days that he brought to Pitt -- but they vibrated with predator energy and he could feel it in his soul. He smiled.
"That was some of the best volleyball we ever played after that," Fairbanks says.
The home crowd -- which was packed to capacity at 2,800 -- was quiet during the first two sets. But when the players got back onto the court for the third set, they couldn't hear a thing. The Pittsburgh fans responded to the team's energy with their own.
"Maybe they all screamed, too," Fairbanks says.
When the third set began, Pitt looked transformed. They dug every ball. They jumped high and blocked hard. Fisher, standing in front of a crowd of loud Louisville fans, hooted, punching his fists in the air. They won the third set. In the fourth, when Babcock went to the service line and looked to Fisher for advice, he yelled "hammer it in." She did. Five times in a row. Fisher screamed, jumping up and down in excitement. It was the most animated the staff had ever seen him, so much so that they thought he was going to chest bump them. (He didn't.)
Pitt won the fourth set.
In the final set, Cat Flood, with her fiery hair -- black on one side and platinum blonde on the other -- went on a serving spree to make it 7-1 Panthers. A Fairbanks assist, her 48th of the match, sent Pitt to its third straight final four.
Five days later, Pitt met five-time national champion Nebraska in Tampa, Florida. Walking onto the court, the Pitt players felt nervous. The moment felt too big, their résumé too small. In key moments, they let Nebraska control the points. They lost in straight sets -- their third final four loss in as many years.
When they walked back to the locker room, seething and sweat dripping down their backs, they made eye contact. They all had the same thought: Get me back to the gym tomorrow. I want to win a national championship.
"The anger turned to hunger," Fairbanks says.
WHEN A 36-YEAR-OLD Dan Fisher said yes to the coaching job at Pitt 12 years ago, he didn't have a grand plan for a program that had one win in 45 games against a top-10 opponent in its history. Fisher, who lived in Orange County at the time with his wife and their 3-month-old baby, needed the money. He accepted a five-year contract and thought, I should probably make it to the NCAA tournament by the end of my contract if I want to keep my job.
The 6-foot-6 Fisher had played professionally in Spain, Belgium and Switzerland, coached for the U.S. national team and led Concordia University, a small program in Irvine, to its first NAIA championship in 2012. He had spent years soaking up as much as he could about leadership and team chemistry. Wherever he lived, he learned the language, the traditions, the culture. His teams became his home, his haven.
He wanted to create a home for the players who chose to come to Pitt. For the first three years, he wasn't in a hurry to succeed. The thing he cared about most: investing in the players.
"If you go to another program, you're going to be one of eight players in the same position," he told recruits. "Or you can come here and I'm going to [fully] invest in you as a person."
Pitt recruited the best players it could. Petrone, who was then a volunteer, memorized names and details of every single recruit -- 300 or so every year -- and traveled the country to sell the idea of developing a holistic player. Parents stopped to ask him if he was from Pittsburg State in Kansas. Others asked where the University of Pittsburgh was located.
Things weren't much better back home in Pittsburgh. Barely anybody showed up to games. Fisher hounded the players at Catholic schools, promising them "Diocese Day," and sometimes girls from the schools showed up. Fisher celebrated the small wins.
Fisher's first season, in 2013, was also Pitt's first season in the ACC. The Panthers went 19-14 and finished fifth in the conference. They improved to 25-6 the next year.
"We just really had to embrace being good over time," Fisher says. "Hey, you're not going to necessarily win the first rally, we're going to have to judge ourselves out of 100 sets, how many are good sets?'"
In 2014, when Fisher offered Kamalani Akeo, who is now his assistant coach, a spot on the team, she wasn't sure if she had what it took to be a Division I player. She was a 5-foot-8 setter from Hawaii. Fisher saw in her a scrappy player who could switch roles to play libero when the team needed her. He told her his goal for the team was to make the NCAA tournament, and she bought into his dream. Their ceiling looked different back then. "It was, 'How are we going to beat Notre Dame?'" Akeo says. "It wasn't necessarily, 'How are we going to beat Nebraska?'"
In Fisher's fourth season, in 2016, Pitt made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 12 years. The Panthers beat Dayton in the first round before losing to in-state powerhouse Penn State in the second. Still, Fisher sensed the momentum.
By 2018, three big-hitting players, Chinaza Ndee, Layne Van Buskirk and Kayla Lund, had arrived at Pitt and raised expectations even higher. In the early days, Fisher often felt like there was a cap on how far the team could go. "It didn't matter how good we were as coaches," Fisher says. "We were just limited physically."
That changed with this trio.
"I remember having this feeling like if I can't make a run at the tournament, this is on me," Fisher says.
WEARING A MASK, Fisher stands in an almost empty CHI Health Center in Omaha, Nebraska, on a frigid April 2021 day. After months of uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, here he was, four months later than the tournament usually is held. For the past four years, Pitt had been eliminated in the second round of the NCAA tournament. But this year they beat Utah to advance to the regional semifinals. And now here they are up 14-11 in the fifth set against No. 3 seed Minnesota.
Middle blocker Chiamaka Nwokolo slams the ball down the middle from the back row for the final kill, and Fisher throws his hands in the air. The mask covers his smile, but his eyes gave it away. Ndee, who had a team-high 19 kills, runs over and jumps into his arms.
I'm so happy that Fish got this win. I'm so happy that my teammates got this win. I'm so happy to experience this with Pitt, Ndee thought as she hugged Fisher.
For the first time in program history, Pitt had made it to the regional final. They fell in five sets to Washington in the Elite Eight, but the Panthers had expanded their territory.
Middle blocker Serena Gray, who helped seven-time national champion Penn State reach the Sweet 16 three years in a row, transferred to Pitt weeks later. "There's a huge focus on player development," Gray says. "That showed me that this program was being actually built from the ground up into something great."
Fisher made a bold statement to Gray, "Hey, just so you know, I don't think you're transferring down -- we got a chance to do better than the team you're on."
Fisher wasn't blustering. For the first time since becoming head coach, he believed in his soul that Pitt had what it took to win a national championship. "We're returning everybody," he says. "And I felt like she would be a piece that would push us over."
That was also the year Fisher unleashed the hunter mentality, Ndee says. Gray remembers the team gathering around their sports psychologist and visualizing a predator and prey. They talked about body language on the court. Submissive actions that made them smaller. Sass and boldness that made them larger. They discussed how to attack every point and how to look like predators even while making defensive plays. It was all about body language. They practiced how to talk to teammates in a way that built confidence.
"How can we attack offensively in a proactive way versus reactionary or like a prey kind of way where we go inward on ourselves and have ourselves a little pity party because that's very prey behavior," Gray says.
"A big part of how we play is we're aggressive, we rarely tip," Ndee says. "If you're the hunter, you don't have the time to be thinking about yourself, or be in your head -- or hesitate."
Pitt has come tantalizingly close to the championship every year since. In 2021, Pitt beat Penn State in the second round -- making Fisher's statement to Gray true -- and Gray remembers her new teammates having her back the entire match. She felt loved. They went on to reach the final four for the first time in program history, but lost in four sets to Nebraska.
In Gray's senior season in 2022, Pitt finished 30-2, the most wins for the program under Fisher. They won the ACC championship. They returned to the final four but lost to Louisville.
Early on, Fisher always felt like he wanted the championship more than his players did. By the time Gray graduated, that had changed.
The Panthers were poised to pounce.
FISHER GRABS A spiral-bound notebook from his L-shaped office desk on the second floor of Fitzgerald Field House. Printed on the cover is the title "The Championship DNA." The book is filled with unruled 8x11 pages. He considers it a living and breathing member of the team.
"I can show you," Fisher says, smiling. "But you'd have to be sworn to secrecy."
Fisher flips the front cover. There's a yellow and red double helix printed on the first page. Two strands that twist around each other like an infinity symbol. The strands are made of circles, some large and some small. A word is printed next to each circle.
Fisher points to one: "Gratitude."
"It's one of my coaching pillars," he says.
He points to another: "Mudita." A Sanskrit word.
"The feeling of empathy or altruism or a period of joy for another person," Fisher says.
And another: Stamina.
He says he talks to his team a lot about the difference between grit and stamina. Anybody can be gritty one time. But can you sustain it over a period of time? That's what makes champions, he says, his gaze piercing.
He flips more pages. He has regular conversations with the players, he says, about what they need to eliminate and what they need to focus on. Sometimes they rip up pages that no longer make sense. That's why it's a spiral notebook. It's easy to add pages -- and easy to toss them.
Subconsciously at first, and then with intention, Fisher cultivated a unique culture at Pitt. He guards it, fears its fragility. He and the players work to nourish it every day.
Playing pro overseas allowed Fisher to notice which coaching tactics worked. He found Eastern European coaches to be overly masculine and critical. They focused on everything that went wrong with the previous play. American coaches, he thought, tended to be unendingly positive. Fisher wanted a balance.
He ended up picking and choosing parts of different cultures he experienced and mashed them into one. "Do you need to scream right now?" he asked his players in his early years after a frustrating set, and he'd get in the huddle with them and scream. He came up with the idea of "team czars," players who are in charge of specific duties, like playing music, cleaning the locker room, bringing energy.
He's a big believer in the "rehearsal," where his team sits and envisions playing a team. "We don't want our first time to be our first time," Petrone says.
Fisher also loves the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team and the energy that emanates from them when they do their traditional haka dance. So he encouraged his players to choreograph a dance of their own.
Fisher picked up other silly superstitions along the way. He eats a lozenge per set because he ate some during a match in 2018 or 2019 when he had a sore throat and then Pitt won 20 straight. The staff forbade him from breaking the habit.
Today he's guarding his culture from the trappings that success can bring.
"Selfishness," Fisher says. "And how it manifests itself."
The answer, of course, is in "The Championship DNA." He flips through the pages. "Be special when it benefits the team." Mudita.
"The best moments in life are when you're not thinking about yourself -- when you're lost in the moment," Fisher says. "In volleyball, you can see it when someone gets so excited for someone else's kill -- you know, life is a lot better when it's not all about you."
To Fisher, hunter mindset and mudita are complementary traits. You align as a pack. You cheer for your pack. You hunt the enemy.
BABCOCK, FAIRBANKS AND Vazquez Gomez sit down on a gray sofa in the lounge area of the coaches offices. It's the day before Pitt vs. Stanford and the team has just practiced for 155 minutes.
A tray of homemade chocolate brownies sits atop the coffee table in front of them and they grab one each. Babcock says she didn't eat breakfast that morning. Vazquez Gomez shakes her head in disapproval. "Don't say that," Fairbanks says. "Why didn't you fuel your body before practice?" Babcock apologizes, smiling sheepishly.
They talk about their favorite brunch spots. Babcock's mom is in town and she's looking to take her out to eat that afternoon. There is an ease about them. A cohesion that comes from intentional culture-building.
Babcock remembers the first time she felt that way. It was when she sat down in Fisher's office on a recruiting trip in 2021, and Fisher slid a chart across his desk.
It laid out a five-year plan. Not for the team. Specifically for her. It was separated into components like training, diet, playing for the national team and playing professionally.
Babcock, who was one of the top recruits in the nation in the Class of 2023, visited two schools before she showed up at Pitt, and all she needed was a day to realize Pitt is where she belonged. Fisher had spent days thinking about her and mapping out her life. She appreciated that. She also loved how the players included her as one of their own and took her everywhere with them. She'd heard people talk about Pitt's culture, but the visit blew her away. She committed immediately.
Vazquez Gomez and Fairbanks share similar stories. Fisher recruited Vazquez Gomez after hearing about her success as an outside hitter in Puerto Rico. Fairbanks' precision, even as a high schooler, impressed Fisher. He knew with time she could be lethal. Both players moved to Pittsburgh -- Vazquez Gomez never even visited the school -- for Fisher. They saw in him a visionary whose approach felt unlike anything they'd experienced before.
By the time Babcock joined the team in 2023, Vazquez Gomez and Fairbanks had already helped Pitt make their second straight final four. Fairbanks became the first underclassman in program history to be named All-American in 2022. Vazquez Gomez recorded 50 kills and 62 digs in that year's NCAA tournament.
Thanks in part to that screaming session in the women's bathroom on that December day in 2023, Babcock helped the team make the final four three years in a row. The chart Fisher had prepared for Babcock was coming true. Under the first year, he saw her starting to play a dominant role for Pitt.
Babcock started all 34 matches. She led the team in kills, and her monstrous jump serve gave her a team-high 51 aces. She jumped so high and spiked the ball so hard that opponents sometimes froze.
She was named the National Freshman of the Year, a first for the program.
So when they lost to Nebraska in the final four in 2023, Babcock spent hours crying -- in the locker room and then during dinner with her parents. Her mind was made up. She was going to bring home a national championship. She was going to do it for herself, of course, but she also was going to do it for her team and for Fisher. Mudita.
It wasn't just Babcock who felt that way. Every single person on the team -- and it was returning five of the previous year's starters -- was buzzing with mudita.
From their first match of the 2024 season, Pitt has played at another level. They packed Petersen Events Center, the school's basketball facility, with 11,800 fans -- a volleyball record -- for their sweep of Penn State.
"We're on a mission from the first point," Fairbanks says.
"1,000%," Babcock says, nodding.
For the first time, the team is getting recognized all over Steel City. Fans stop the players at restaurants, out on walks and in coffee shops. Fisher and the seniors remind each other how far they've come. Vazquez Gomez finds herself leading those conversations. We used to dream of making the tournament, she says. A few dozen people showed up to our matches and didn't even cheer when we got great kills, she bemoans. Let's all pause to recognize how far we've come, she says, her eyes glistening.
They love how Pittsburgh has shown up for them, but fame still feels new and awkward.
"If we were the type of people that were like, 'I want the fanciest this, the fanciest that,' we wouldn't be as tight-knit as we are," Fairbanks says. "Rather than striving for fame, none of us talk about people noticing us like, 'Oh my gosh, I love it.'"
Babcock and Vazquez Gomez nod vigorously.
They've lost just once this season, to SMU in October. The team took two days off. Then the players came together and watched videos of the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, a group of fighter pilots. They're known for their elite debriefing style after every mission.
The players gave their process a shot: A critic of self, followed by a gratitude of the collective. It's efficient, direct and authentic.
The debrief, Fisher says, has become another Pitt cornerstone.
As always, it's about the details -- wherever they can find that edge. Pitt has history to make. And a title to hunt.
"Being No.1 doesn't matter if we don't win the national championship," Vazquez Gomez says.
PITT TRAINER DEIRDRE CHATLOS places a cough drop in a paper cup and drops it onto Fisher's right palm. He unwraps the cover and drops the lozenge in his mouth. The game against Stanford is ready to begin.
At 3-2 in the first set, Babcock stands near the net, on the right side. She jumps just as Stanford's Elia Rubin slams the ball toward her. Babcock's palms make contact with the ball, and it rolls off onto the Stanford side of the net. A perfect block. Point Pitt. Babcock shrugs. Her teammates swarm her. "Let's go," she yells.
Immediately, the coaching staff relaxes. We're going to win this, Petrone thinks. At 13-8, Babcock hammers another block, this time wagging her index finger. The ball's not going past me. At 23-19 in the third set, Fairbanks back-sets Babcock, who pummels a kill. The Stanford block is no match for Fairbanks' pace or Babcock's power.
In front of a packed home crowd, Pitt sweeps Stanford. The win isn't shocking -- not anymore -- but the way they dominated stands out. There was not a moment where Stanford stood a chance. Pitt stayed ahead of Miner, who is widely considered the best setter in the nation, at almost every point. Fairbanks recorded 35 assists and nine digs. Babcock finished with 17 kills. They didn't need to imagine themselves in the fourth set. It didn't get that far.
That's been the case for the Panthers for most of the season. They won their first 12 matches -- a stretch that included sweeps of USC and Penn State, members of that coveted championship club -- without dropping a set. After losing to SMU, they won their final 14 regular-season games, including two against ACC rival Louisville. They won their third straight ACC championship. Now they take the overall No. 1 seed into the NCAA tournament, another program first.
"Historically, volleyball has been [about] a group of eight teams, and we're fighting to show that we belong," Fairbanks says.
The next day -- for the seventh straight week -- Pitt is ranked No. 1. Babcock is named national player of the week. Fairbanks is named ACC setter of the week. Bre Kelley is named the conference's defensive player of the week.
"This group is the best team I've had in wanting to be great all the time," Fisher says.
Does he think Pitt can win it all this year?
"Definitely," Fisher says emphatically. "The key is to be the aggressor, to be in the hunter mindset. We want to always feel like we're going after somebody."
He sits up taller. Puffs his chest out. He reaches for "The Championship DNA."