No. 4 Nebraska, playing at home, edged defending champion and preseason No. 1 UCLA in five games, as the women's college season opened this weekend. Both teams return most of their top players from a year ago, but each has some niches to fill. I have proposed hitting allocation (the percentage of a team's spike attempts taken by each player) as one way to characterize a team's offense. Whether one player takes an enormous share of a team's attempts, or a team has two or three hitters who lead the team with roughly the same share of attempts, tells us something. So does the way a team changes from year to year in hitting allocation. The Cornhuskers no longer have middle-blocker Brooke Delano , who was a senior in 2011. She led the team in hitting percentage a year ago, with a .331 mark. Among UCLA's seniors from last year were setter Lauren van Orden and MB Sara Sage, who hit .386 last season, albeit on only 184 attempts. Let's look first at Nebraska'