There’s an adage as old as time that championships aren’t won. They’re earned.Well, the Kentucky volleyball team is going to have to earn every bit of the Southeastern Conference championship after dropping a heartbreaking 3-1 defeat to 18-time defending conference champion Florida on Sunday at Memorial Coliseum.With the conference crown officially out of their reach, the Gators decided to have a say in the title after all by playing the role of spoiler. After suffering two straight losses to the Cats, Florida rebounded by taking a commanding 2-0 lead.
Up 21-17 in the first set, the Cats had a chance to take set one, but Florida stormed back and won an emotionally driven and back-and-forth opening stanza. The Gators set the tone early on, and the Cats never recovered.”It takes special plays at that moment in the game,” head coach Craig Skinner said. “It takes big-time plays, big-time digs, big-time sets and big-time kills to win it. We kind of had a couple of opportunities but didn’t capitalize and they did in those situations.”Skinner pointed to a strong Florida serving game as one of the keys. The Gators mustered just five serving aces on the afternoon, but often times the jump serves put UK out of position and on the defensive.”We got on our heels after getting a big lead the first game,” Skinner said. “They applied a lot of pressure on their serve and we didn’t bounce back with our serving to get them out of their system and into our system for us to have success.”The Cats suffered a key loss after the second set when last year’s SEC Player of the Year and senior setter Sarah Rumely went down with an illness. Rumely tried to come back out briefly in the third set, she was unable to finish the set and was on the sidelines in her warm-ups the rest of the match. Redshirt freshman Christine Hartmann filled in for her and came away with 13 assists.Skinner said Rumely’s loss had no ill effect on the loss. The fifth-year coach said they simply didn’t take advantage of a valuable opportunity early in the match.It was a rare slip-up for a team on Senior Day of all days to let a golden chance slip through their fingers.”Those seniors have given us so much,” Skinner said. “It’s not about one match for them. It’s about an entire career. The wins the seniors have given us have been unbelievable. We talked about asserting ourselves and we need to assert ourselves better when we have opportunities.”The important thing is that the Cats have put themselves in a position to still grab a share of the conference crown at Tennessee on Wednesday. The problem is that if they lose, LSU will capture the outright title because of a season-ending win vs. Alabama on Sunday.”We put ourselves in a position,” Skinner said. “We know what we have to do and it’s about stepping up and making that happen. Unfortunately we didn’t get it done today.”The Cats had the very same opportunity last season to clinch a share of the title at home vs. Tennessee, but the Vols came away with a shocking defeat on the final day of the regular season. Despite a heartbreaking loss Sunday and despite dropping a match to Tennessee earlier in the year, Skinner is confident that this year will not be a case of deja vu. He believes his team will bounce back and earn it.”I have complete faith in this team,” Skinner said. “I know they’ll come in practice on Monday and Tuesday and practice hard. We always practice well. There’s an opportunity Wednesday and I know our team will come out ready to go. There is no other team I would rather be coaching than this one.”