Friday evening will mark the start of Steve Aird’s third season as Indiana volleyball coach, but it’s really only the beginning of an on-court rebuilding effort that Aird hopes will make IU a consistent competitor in the sport’s top conference. That’s because his staff signed the No. 15 recruiting class in the country last spring, the highest-ranked haul in program history.
And now, with an abbreviated spring season set to begin on Friday night, it’ll be those highly-regarded newcomers who’ll be tasked with pulling Indiana out of the depths of the Big Ten in the years to come.