Defense Leads Volleyball Cats to Final Four

The Kentucky volleyball team  used service pressure to beat Creighton on Saturday to advance to the Final Four. While serving is the first part of the equation, being able to get set defensively is the second part, and the Cats did that extremely well against the Blue Jays.

UK had 62 digs in the match and eight total blocks. After the match, UK head coach Craig Skinner praised his team’s defensive effort.

“To hold a team like that to .066 is a lot to do with your defense, and you know, it’s a mentality,” Skinner said. “We have to establish a defensive mentality in practice.  We hammer balls at them all the time, they’re flying all over the gym, making plays. We have a couple rules, we’ll reason why you don’t go for the ball; that would be out of bounds, hear the whistle, or some sort of danger is in the way. Outside of that, you better go for the ball. But it’s just, you have to set that in practice, and we’ve spent a lot of time this year, just hammering that into our team, and it’s, man, it’s fun to watch, too.”

Kentucky senior outside hitter Eva Hudson thought she and her teammates responded to the coaching staff’s challenge.

“Craig asked us to be relentless all evening,” Hudson said. “That sort of defense is so frustrating, one of your best shots and it being dug up. That was our mindset every time.”

Junior outside hitter Brooklyn DeLeye also thought that the coaches did a great job of putting together an effective game plan for Saturday’s match.

“Props to the staff, I mean they really had a good game plan going into the match and I think we just executed that at a high level,” DeLeye said. “Even if Creighton was making changes throughout the match, they were still telling us every single time we were at the net what to do.”

Creighton head coach Brian Rosen said after the match that Kentucky’s defense made it very difficult on his team.

“I just thought their defense tonight was the difference,” Rosen said. “They were an arm and ball back up. We ended up with nine blocks. I thought we could have had 18 tonight. They covered so well, just kept plays alive long enough for their outsides to terminate eventually. And so again, I just I give them a lot of credit for that.”

Defense wins championships, and on Saturday, that was true for Kentucky.