BUTTE, Mont. -- Before the 2024 season, one Frontier Conference head coach picked Montana Tech's volleyball team to finish last in the league.

And not without reason. The Orediggers only returned three starters from the prior year's 24-6 team. Two All-America honorees graduated. It could easily have been the end of a tremendous stretch for Digger volleyball, an era that featured three-straight NAIA National Tournament appearances and four in five seasons.

Instead, Montana Tech leaned on perhaps its greatest strength: a winning culture. The Orediggers enter the 2024 national tournament ranked 17th in the country and a 19-10 record, including an 11-4 Frontier mark and regular-season-series wins over every school in the conference.

Tech brings that résumé into an opening-round home match Saturday at 4 p.m. against another NAIA blue-blood program in Bushnell University, an at-large entrant out of the Cascade Conference.

But Montana Tech's team is certain about one thing: this 2024 edition earned the right to play host in the first round of the national tournament. And at the center of that are three women who women whose long-standing Oredigger careers will end with the season's conclusion — graduate students Megan Benton and Alexis Umland and senior Olivia LaBeau.

All three played roles on the prior Montana Tech teams; none was ever the star. But now their leadership has carried a team that had little outside respect into a contender for the national title.

"Obviously we're going to work hard," Umland said, "but we didn't have the same expectations, I guess, as we had in years prior. … But once we came together and found rotations and started playing, we had the realization that we are pretty good."

If they didn't know it by the time they started playing matches, the Tech team learned it had potential soon after. The Orediggers started the year with a 5-1 record against a tough opening slate at the home Big Sky Volleyball Challenge and a tournament hosted by national power Bellevue in Nebraska.

The upperclassmen's development paired well with an immensely talented freshman class. (Montana Tech wound up contributing half the Frontier's All-Freshman Team when the league announced it last week. Piper Jette was the conference freshman of the year, and Brooklynn Hayes and Austin Long joined Jette on the six-woman honor roll.) Graduate student libero Jelena Jablanov, in her third year with the program after transferring from Eastern Wyoming College, and sophomore setter Rhys Layton returned to the starting lineup; Layton was the 2023 Frontier Freshman of the Year. LaBeau was a second-team all-conference player last season. It's not as though the cupboard was bare.

"I knew we were going to be solid, because we had a lot of talent coming in," Benton, a middle hitter, said before acknowledging the experience on the other half of the team helped.

"Our team's held a lot of composure through high-pressure games," she added.

That composure proved huge down the stretch, when the Orediggers gutted out five-set wins over conference rivals MSU-Northern, Carroll, and Montana Western during a key six-match win streak late in the year. That torrid stretch cinched the tournament bid for the Orediggers, earning them an at-large spot even after the team exited in the Frontier tournament semifinal round.

Even during a few tough skids early in the year, the team never lost its cohesion.

"This is the most positive and connected team we've had," 13th-year Montana Tech head coach Brian Solomon said.

The players feel it, too.

"There's no tension," Benton said. "We all get along really well."

And that teamwork shows on the court, too. Sure, Tech saw three players — LaBeau, junior outside Kinnidi Willmore, and Layton — to the all-conference teams. But it's the team's balance which has proven deadly to opponents. You can't just stop one Oredigger and stop the team. Five players have 100 or more kills. On the back row, six have topped the century mark in digs.

"I don't know if we were underestimated at the start," Benton said, "but it's nice that there wasn't expectation. We were able to focus on ourselves and our jobs."

And that, at least for those in their final year with the program, makes this run even sweeter.

"It means almost more this year to have gotten here because we definitely were not expected to," Umland said. "… It felt like we had to work for it more in a way." 

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