Volleyball Cats Learned from Tough Start to Season

The Kentucky volleyball team was ranked fifth in the preseason national polls, heading to California to begin the 2018 campaign in USC’s season-opening tournament. The Cats faced three tough opponents (Creighton, Northern Iowa and USC) and promptly came home with three losses.

At that point, the Wildcats were still establishing their identity. The team was still trying to replace five seniors, including four key contributors, from last season’s Elite Eight team.

Kentucky head coach Craig Skinner said his team figured out early on that this season was different than last year.

“Winning is very difficult,” Skinner said. “We had so much success last year, won the league and made the Elite Eight, maybe success was taken for granted. We didn’t have our first good week of practice until the second or third week of the season. We learned a lot.”

What Skinner has seen from his team this season has been an amazing turnaround.

“I can’t even measure it,” Skinner said. “The competitive maturity and understanding of how important each day is wasn’t very evident during preseason. Quickly, we realized how important that was and I think our team got to work right away when we got back from California. I just haven’t seen a group take each day as important as this group has. It’s been impressive to see how much they have grown.”

Since going 0-3 to open the season, the Cats are 24-1, including a perfect 18-0 mark in the SEC. On Sunday night, Kentucky learned that it would be the 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament, which begins in Lexington on Friday.

All-SEC setter Madison Lilley thinks the early trip to California paid off for the Cats.

“That was a pretty tough trip out in L.A., I think it kind of opened our eyes,” Lilley said. “It made us realize what we need to work on. We got in the gym and got better. It was really good for us and I’m glad that we went through it, it did us well.”

SEC Player of the Year Leah Edmond thinks the early losses allowed the team to step back and realize what they needed to do.

“I think we got put in that predicament because no one expected us to go 0-3,” Edmond said. “We didn’t expect to go 0-3, so we really had to re-assess who we are as a team, we really had to work together and I think that really brought us together, and we’ve been rolling ever since.”

Now, the Cats open the 2018 NCAA Tournament facing intrastate foe Murray State on Friday. If the Cats win, they would face the winner of Purdue-East Tennessee State in the second round on Saturday. Skinner thinks the team will be ready because of last year’s tournament experience.

“More than half of the team was in the NCAA Tournament last year and obviously, we had some really tough matches there,” Skinner said. “So they understand the difference of regular season and tournament, so I think we’ll be ready.”

After the tough beginning to the season, it was hard to imagine that Kentucky might host NCAA Tournament games. But the early-season losses have paid dividends for this team, and they will continue to build on that experience as the postseason begins on Friday.