As the Lady Vols entered Wednesday’s contest against the Florida Gators, they were sporting an 11-game home winning streak that dated all the way back to the end of last season.
After five grueling sets between the two sides, the Lady Vols saw the dominant home stretch come to a close. The Gators downed the Lady Vols 3-2 in a match that went the distance with all five sets.
“I think we played well, but not well enough to win in the fifth set,” head coach Eve Rackham Watt said. “Just way too many attacking errors.
The Lady Vols’ home record on the season now moves to 9-1 on the year after the loss — likely the most difficult loss of the season to swallow. The team’s previous two losses on the season came against Texas and Purdue, both ranked in the top 25.
The Gators stand as the first unranked team of the season to defeat the Lady Vols.
“I think that it shows again, just the margins are super small, and this conference, everybody’s good,” Rackham Watt said. “So you may find yourself in the fifth set quite often.”
The game started strongly for Tennessee, and they won the opening set 25-19 rather convincingly after posting a 7-1 run over the Gators in the middle stages of the first set.
Despite the early lead, it felt as though the momentum switched to the Gators just as quickly as they had lost it. An impressive 25-23 win in the second round evened the match back up at a set apiece.
Yet the Lady Vols’ worst played set of the night came in set three, where the Gators claimed the lead with a 25-15 set victory.
“Yeah, we were just bad,” Rackham Watt said. “I really can’t point to one thing that was going wrong. Just across the board, we were bad.”
The Lady Vols were outperformed in every facet of the game in set three. As a team, they hit just .077 percent from the court while the Gators hit an impressive .355, along with just one error compared to the LadyVols’ nine.
The third set, while not the finishing blow, was enough for the Gators to let the Lady Vols know they weren’t just playing for participation. At this point, though, it’s a given that the SEC remains one of NCAA volleyball’s most competitive.
While it’s a good look on the resume to have the team’s losses either come against ranked or conference opponents, this game felt like one that the Lady Vols just couldn’t afford to lose.
Following the third set, the Lady Vols responded with a much more efficient fourth set, which saw the team hit .457 with just three errors to go with over 35 attacks.
The inconsistencies continued to bleed through as each round passed. Following a solid opening set, the team responded with two straight set losses, including one of the team’s least efficient rounds of the season.
The fifth set served as the third Lady Vols game to go the distance in the last week and a half. They had played no five-set matches beforehand.
Momentum was not on the Lady Vols’ side. After posting a hitting percentage of .457 in the fourth set, the offense responded with a .103 percentage in the final set. Another notable stat, the team had two critical service errors that gave Florida extra breathing room.
“It was just a lot of our offense just didn’t run smoothly tonight,” Rackham Watt said. “We started okay, and then it just kind of slipped, but certainly in the sense that we lost our offense was just kind of nonexistent.”
Each set felt like a completely different game, which in the end did not pay dividends for the Lady Vols. While playing the game down to the final points, the game went to the team with the least amount of mistakes.
Hayden Kubik led the team in kills, but Mackenzie Plante has continued to take encouraging steps offensively despite the up-and-down performance from the team.
“I love the way Mackenzie is playing, I think she’s playing with a lot of confidence,” Rackham Watt said. “I think she gets better every week, and she’s going to be important for us moving forward.”
