A lot can change in 37 days. Just ask the 10th-ranked Florida Gators volleyball team.
On Sept. 18, the Gators went to Oxford to begin their 18th SEC title defense and managed to escape with a five-set victory that proved winning No. 19 would not be a piece of cake. A few losses later and the Gators didn’t look as invincible as they were on paper heading into the season.
But when the Rebels hit the fast-forward button to Sunday at the O’Connell Center, they found a Florida team that was completely different than the one they pushed to the brink the first time around.
In the interim, the Gators have added a little killer instinct and consistency to go along with all their talent, and they used the formidable formula to put away Ole Miss 3-0 (25-18, 25-13, 25-16) Sunday in the O’Connell Center.
In the first meeting between the teams, Ole Miss (8-14, 2-10 SEC West) jumped on the Gators (16-3, 10-2 SEC East) early and stole the first set of the match, putting Florida in a position where it would have to fight for everything the rest of the way.
This time, however, the Rebels were unable to get anything going against a much-improved Gators team.
“Ole Miss never really had a chance to get on track, and a lot of it had to do with what we were doing on our side,” Florida coach Mary Wise said.
What Florida has been doing is working on improving weaknesses that left the Gators vulnerable in several aspects of the game, but now Florida is able to score points from all areas of the game.
“I think we’re just a better team all-around,” said sophomore Kristy Jaeckel. “We’ve really worked hard on the areas we need to improve, so we might have had weaknesses the first time we played them. I think our serving and our point-scoring is definitely helping us a lot right now. We have been really focusing on scoring points and being aggressive with our serves and going after them when we have the ball. So I think that’s really helped us.”
That aggressive serving led to another match in which the Gators were able to put some quick points on the board. The Gators had five aces after notching eight on Friday, with five different players knocking one home. Even when the Gators weren’t putting down aces, they were constantly putting the Rebels on their heels with their serving.
“I really enjoy serving personally,” said Brynja Rodgers, who had one ace after hitting home a career-high four Friday. “If we can go back there and hit a good ball and it doesn’t go down for an ace, but we can get them out of system, then our defense and blocking will do the rest.”
Of course that aggressive nature also led the Gators to committing a lot of errors on the serve, mishitting 10 serves in the match. But as the Gators continue to improve, those errors will eventually start turning into good serves, so Wise tells her players to approach the game with a philosophy to be aggressive because there are some errors with which the team is willing to live.
The players certainly know which ones are of the acceptable kind. In fact, they are more than willing to call one another out if they don’t take a chance.
“If you’re being really aggressive, it’s OK to make errors,” Rodgers said.”But if you’re being a ‘wimp’ and you don’t make errors, that’s what we don’t like to see. It’s a team effort. We always try to push each other to be better, and if we make errors while we’re trying extra hard, we keep going hard the whole time.”
Although the Gators made their share of errors in the match, their aggressiveness paid dividends in other areas of the game.
The Gators were relentless at blocking the ball yet again, out-blocking the Rebels 9-2, a far cry from the September meeting when the Rebels out-blocked the Gators 16-14 in five sets. Wise noted that since their first meeting, whenever the Rebels were able to put up more blocks than their opponent, they would ride the front-line play to victory.
But the Rebels not only were unable to get their blocking on track, their offense found itself unable to adjust to Florida’s non-stop blocking. The Rebels were only able to muster a .081 attacking percentage with a lowly 23 kills and 18 assists.
On the flip side, the Gators put together another efficient match on the attacking end, hitting .309 for the match, led by sophomore Kelly Murphy’s 14 kills and 15 assists. Rodgers, who led Florida with 21 assists, seemed to constantly feed a Murphy attack that left the Rebels mystified.
“She was in a pretty good offensive groove today,” Wise said. “There was one hit I thought Kelly just hit it over the block. When Kelly is swinging it like that, she has a good matchup in terms of the defense Ole Miss is running.”
The rest of the Gators attack gave the Rebels a steady dose of kills from all over the court, with Jaeckel (6 kills), Colleen Ward (6), Kristina Johnson (5), Cassandra Anderson (5) and Callie Rivers (5) leaving the Rebels guessing where the next spike was going to come from.
In particular, Rivers has come on strong for the Gators in the past couple of weeks. She and Johnson led the Gators with 5-for-8 hitting performances. Rivers has also started to “come into her own on blocking,” according to Wise. She tallied a solo block and an assist on the night.
She has been so effective that Wise finds herself in the position of having too much talent to try to put onto the court, saying that she hasn’t been able to fit junior Lauren Bledsoe into the lineup much recently in order to give Rivers, who moved to the right side this season, more experience at her new position. Both figure to play valuable roles for the team down the stretch.
That stretch will see the Gators able to control their own destiny as they now sit tied with LSU and Tennessee one game back of Kentucky.
“It motivates us a lot knowing that we’re back in it now,” Murphy said. “Practices are going to be that more intense. Everything just means so much more. Every practice that we have and every rep that we do, we have to put more into it because we do have a chance. It’s up to us now.”
Florida hits the road this weekend, taking on Alabama Friday night at 8 and then moving over to Mississippi State Sunday afternoon at 2. The Gators then return home for five of their final regular-season matches, starting with Georgia on Friday, Nov. 6.