Kentucky Volleyball drops first SEC Match to South Carolina

There’s no other way of saying it: this was an abysmal loss from the fifth-ranked Kentucky Volleyball team. After smashing Tennessee last week, there’s absolutely no reason the ‘Cats should lose to a South Carolina team that’s 4-8 in the SEC and just lost one of its best players to injury.

Anyway, here’s how the worst UK loss of the season went down:

Recap

Kentucky got off to a rough start, losing the first set. But they held leads at several different points throughout and even had the Gamecocks down at set point with a 24-23 lead. Alas, they let South Carolina run off three straight points to allow a shocking first-set victory.

The sloppiness wasn’t exclusive to the first set early on as Kentucky made a number of easy errors to keep the score close in the second set. However, the Kentucky Volleyball team we’ve come to recognize showed up in the second and hammered the Gamecocks with a 10-0 run following a 14-11 deficit. Lauren Tharp’s pressure from the service line drove the momentum as Kentucky finished the second set off fairly quickly following the 10 straight points.

The ‘Cats came out and played their most complete set of the game in the third. They took an early 10-4 lead as Reagan Rutherford enjoyed perhaps her best performance as a Wildcat through three sets. With help from Azhani Tealer and Alli Stumler, Kentucky just buried SC throughout the third and nearly doubled them up, winning 25-13.

The dominance of that third set makes it all the more frustrating that Kentucky couldn’t finish the job. They had taken complete control against a middling SEC team and just deflated from there.

South Carolina jumped on top 3-0 to start the fourth and UK never got that shock out of their system. They reverted, making the same mistakes they made in the first set-and-a-half and were on the ropes against a much inferior opponent the rest of the way. UK never led in the fourth as South Carolina evened it up at two sets apiece.

Then, Kentucky allowed an early 3-1 run to South Carolina in the fifth to put them behind the eight-ball. And to the certain anger of Craig Skinner, UK let aided the Gamecocks with two service errors on their first two serves of the fifth, and added another later in the set. Just cannot happen in the fifth set of a match.

Ultimately, Kentucky’s control ballooned as the middle of the match drudged on and slowly deflated as the match progressed. And in the fifth set, Kentucky only led at 2-1 and couldn’t overtake South Carolina the rest of the way, eventually falling 15-12.

Simply put: an incredibly disappointing performance that should have never resulted in a loss. But hey, they’re still a top-10 team with a ton of young pillars in their lineup. It’ll be a learning experience.

Stats

Kentucky’s attack was not the issue. In fact, it was one of the better offensive outings from the ‘Cats. Their four leading attackers — Alli Stumler, Madi Skinner, Reagan Rutherford and Azhani Tealer — all hit above .300% on the night.

Stumler led with 21 kills as Skinner added 19, Rutherford 16 and Tealer nine. Emma Grome had a terrific performance in the passing phase, recording 63 kills and generally putting sets right on target.

The defense didn’t even have a bad night statistically, recording 60 total digs. But they had just eight total blocks and played poor situational defense. When they needed to get stops, they just didn’t.

Whew. That’s a bad loss. But still just the first SEC loss for Kentucky. They’ll learn and they’ll move on. Beating the brakes off this same South Carolina squad tomorrow would be a start. Tune in at 7 p.m. tomorrow for what I predict to be a bloodbath in Columbia in the second of two UK-SC games this weekend.