LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- They lost the first set 25-12. Given the stage and the stakes, that’s like a piano dropped on your head from the 12th floor.
In the NCAA volleyball Final Four, Kentucky uncorked its worst set in seven years. Now, the Wildcats can handle losing first sets. They came in an NCAA-best 7-1 in matches they’d started 0-1. But the pressure of that pratfall with a national title shot on the line is considerably multiplied.
Didn’t matter.
Somehow, Kentucky stood up, dusted off the keys, and played five more symphonic movements — crescendoing in a 15-13 fifth set that left Wisconsin flat, stunned, and eliminated.
The Wildcats, who have won 27 straight matches and haven’t lost since Sept. 10 at Pittsburgh, are now one win from a second NCAA championship. They will face an SEC opponent, Texas A&M, which swept Pitt to advance in Thursday’s first semifinal.
Kentucky coach Craig Skinner thought he had seen it all from this resilient team. Looking at the stat sheet after the game, he was still trying to do the math. Wisconsin outhit, out-dug and out-blocked Kentucky. It had more side-outs. About the only thing Kentucky led in was errors. But here they were. They don’t put “grit” on the stat sheet. It just shows up in the final score.
“I'm trying to find stats that we actually led in this match. I finally got to blocks. Well, no. We were close,” Skinner smiled. “But I think the cool thing about this team, I thought we'd done it all and I thought we found every possible way to win, and tonight was a different way.”
But first things first. The nightmare first set had to be overcome. That’s easy to say. There may be nothing harder in sports than to turn momentum when everything has gone wrong. It’s so easy to let the negativity creep in, the “it’s not our day” thoughts. Kentucky hit .056. All Skinner could do heading into the huddle was give his players a little good news, bad news.
“Everyone is angry, we're upset,” Skinner said. “It's unfortunate. I basically said, ‘Congrats, guys, we couldn't have played any worse.’ It was honest. And (Wisconsin) played great. The only thing we can do is flush it and move on to the next set.”
Kentucky steadied itself in the second set, with the help of six Wisconsin service errors. And Eva Hudson, who took a significant leap in her national player of the year candidacy, started swinging away.
She didn’t erupt so much as detonate. After starting slowly — four kills in Set 1, then radio silence in Set 2 — she finished with 29 kills on 55 swings, hit .455 and buried the final ball like she was planting a flag on the moon.
“I don’t know,” she said afterward. “Just swinging away.”
It’s hard to do better than that.
The fifth set wasn’t so much a decider as a heist. Kentucky raced out to a 6-1 lead behind the cold-blooded serving of Trinity Ward, a freshman out of Holy Cross High School in Louisville, who didn’t blink in her first Final Four. Just fired missiles. Her service ace started the a five-point service run that staked Kentucky to an 8-2 lead at the changeover.
“To have the guts to go back there like Trinity did at the beginning of that fifth set and serve not just balls in the court, but tough serves, to impact the match, takes an incredible amount of confidence,” Skinner said. “But she's prepared herself for this moment. That pressure is nothing compared to life pressure. She has overcome a lot to get herself in that moment. She showed how tough she was.”
Kassie O’Brien, another freshman, spent the night setting like she had a mortgage to pay – 54 assists, four digs.
“She was on the run all night,” coach Craig Skinner said. “And never wavered.”
Molly Tuozzo, the team’s philosopher and floor mop, had 17 digs and a mantra: UFO. “The point happens, forget it, next ball.” That’s how you climb out of a 25-12 crater. One serve, one block, one kill at a time. And helmets on. She and Brooklyn DeLeye actually told each other that — “Helmets on” — a little gesture with their hands, before digging in for the next swing.
It’s a volleyball team, not a demolition crew. But Thursday night, it was hard to tell the difference.
DeLeye, whose stat line was a beautiful mess (15 kills, 7 errors, 14 digs, 5 blocks), wasn’t the cleanest attacker. But she was everywhere. By the fifth set, she was defending like she had a diploma on the line.
“She turned into a defensive machine,” Hudson said.
It ended like this: Kentucky had gotten the fifth set to 14-11 and could feel it. Then Wisconsin clawed back one match point, then another. Timeout Kentucky, up 14-13. Match point coming up. A full house howling. National title berth on the line.
The Wisconsin serve was sent to Hudson, who passed to O’Brien off the net, then Hudson buried her 29th kill to seal the deal.
Kentucky’s players, in half-celebration, half-relief, piled onto the court.
This is Kentucky’s second national title match in school history. The last one came during COVID. No fans. No chaos. No deafening digs or gasping fifth sets. This one is different.
And maybe that’s fitting.
“I think the grit piece has been there all along,” DeLeye said. “I think that just comes from practice every day. Just wanting to get better. We've done a good job in not forgetting how we got here. I think that just really pulled through.”
For all its polish and poise, this wasn’t a clean performance. It was messy. It was frantic. It was a five-act Broadway comeback in steel-toed boots.
In short: It was very Kentucky.
And a big finish remaining. Sunday, 3:30 p.m., ABC, Texas A&M. The moment Kentucky’s season has been building for.
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