Fight, Invest, Uncommon: The Texas Trifecta

Heading into the postseason, all 64 teams in the field are centering themselves on their values and getting into the right mindset to make an NCAA tournament run. For Texas, that centers around three words that have been up on the white board in Gregory gym all season long: Fight, Invest, Uncommon. Emma Halter, Abby Vander Wal, and Anja Kujundzic give their thoughts on what these words mean to this team and why they are so important as they prepare to take on the bracket.

Fight:

Emma: "Fight is how we want to play every single day. We're gonna give everything we have until the very end of every game, and the whole season. It's something that goes along with Texas really well, we always talk about Texas Fight."

Abby: "When we get in a rut, just being able to push through and trust each other. We're not gonna back down, so we all have faith in each other that we're gonna get through it."

Anja: "We fight from the first game to the last, so being in the playoffs doesn't change anything about our goal. I feel like we're very hungry."

Invest:

Emma: "Investing not only in what the coaches are teaching us and the program, but in each other and being curious about each other all the time. Obviously, we spend every hour together, but just getting to know each other more and more as much as we can."

Abby: "We all just spend a lot of time together. Especially now, team culture is the most important thing, so we just try and keep it simple, keep the main thing the main thing."

Anja: "I remember whenever we came up with these words, my mind was thinking about investing with everything that you can do to make the program better and to make the girls around you better. Just investing time to get better."

Uncommon:

Emma: "Every single team is training really hard, training every single day, but we're going to do it differently. We're gonna be bought in every single point. We're going to do things that our coaches are talking about like uncommon shots. In clutch moments, we're not gonna fall back on the things that we grew up learning, we're gonna do the uncommon thing that we've been working on all season."

Abby: "We really are trying to play uncommon right now. As everything's getting really serious and the tournament's about to start, we're all trying to play our best volleyball in December and just continuing to get better."

Anja: "Being uncommon on and off the court. Not just with the shots you would consider uncommon, but being uncommon in everything. Taking on the mindset that I know the whole nation is doing this, but I'm gonna do it better."

As the NCAA tournament begins, these are the things that Texas has chosen to prioritize and that will help propel them towards a deep postseason run. They are the core values of 2025 Texas Volleyball all season long. Now it becomes time to put those to the test, starting Friday night at 7pm CT with a match against Florida A&M right at home in newly-taraflexed Gregory gym.