Special Season Ends as One Last Comeback Falls Short
There wasn’t an ounce of quit in the Wildcats, not that it will come as a surprise to anyone.
Kentucky just didn’t have quite enough to overcome a powerful Nebraska team in the Elite Eight.
“This team has fought like hell all season long,” senior Kaz Brown said. “I think if we were going to go out, that was the only way we could.”
For the third match in a row, the fourth-seeded Wildcats (29-4) fell behind early. And for the third match in a row, they mounted a rally. UK, after losing each of the first two sets, won the third in dramatic fashion by surviving three match points and thrilling the Memorial Coliseum crowd of 4,464. One last comeback bid in the fourth, this time from a 24-21 deficit, was stymied by the fifth-seeded and now Final Four-bound Huskers (30-4).
“You look at the stats, that was about as even a match as you can get,” head coach Craig Skinner said. “Four and five seeds going at it toe to toe and they probably won the serving battle, which would have been the difference in the match.”
Skinner will surely spend time in the coming days ruing some of UK’s service errors and a few of Nebraska’s aces. That’s about the only thing he found himself capable of nitpicking, even in the wake of a crushing defeat.
“As a competitor you want to be mad because you just lost a competition, but I can’t find any reason to be mad,” Skinner said. “Just really proud to have been able, with myself and our staff, to coach this team.”
Skinner sensed he had a special group from the very beginning as UK combined experience and a highly touted incoming freshman class. The Cats knew they were talented, but didn’t count on that alone to carry them. Instead, they treated their potential as a responsibility.
“I think probably yelled two or three times this season,” Skinner said. “May have been back in August, but it wasn’t hardly at all. Because they knew what to do. They knew what the expectations were. They knew how hard to work. They knew that if they didn’t work hard enough they couldn’t be what they wanted to be.”
Much of the credit for that goes to a five-member senior class of Brown, Ashley Dusek, Emily Franklin, Darian Mack and Harper Hempel.
“Our dream is to be an elite program and compete for a national championship,” Skinner said. “That was on these seniors’ mind all year long, is to compete for a national championship. We talked about it August and we did that. Did we get it there yet? No. But it’s hard and these guys left a legacy for the returning players to live up to.”
The attitude of those seniors – who won their 100th match in the Sweet 16 on Friday – permeated the entire team. Now, they move on to the next stage of their lives to watch their younger teammates carry that forward.
“All season long we’ve had to fight through adversity, whether it be on or off the court,” Brown said. “This team is really tough, as you can see. We had a lot of young players that didn’t show their youth a lot and I think that shows a lot about the type of kids we bring in.”
The seniors leave behind a foundation that includes the program’s first Southeastern Conference championship in 29 years and first Elite Eight appearance in the 64-team era of the NCAA Tournament. They made that Elite Eight on the strength of back-to-back five-set wins in comeback fashion, which captured the imagination of Kentucky fans in a way a volleyball team has never done before.
“This team is special and our state, our volleyball community, our university will remember this group for a long time,” Skinner said. “Like I told them in the locker room, these seniors have left a foundation for us to springboard off.”
Though the Final Four was just of their grasp, they will leave with their heads held high.
“They did everything right,” Skinner said. “You struggle to find the words at the end of a season to make it feel right, but everybody in that locker room knows what they’ve done and how proud they should be and how they should feel about what we accomplished.”
