Going into last season, coach Mary Wise wasn’t sure what to expect from her extremely young Florida volleyball team.
A coach of Wise’s pedigree — she is the nation’s winningest coach since she came to Florida in 1991 with a 578-61 record — has seen many things in her career and coached many different kinds of teams. So surely she was ready to take on the challenge of coaching a team so young, a team with six incoming freshmen, one of whom redshirted.
But just because Wise was ready for the task, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t a little nervous about her team’s makeup.
“A year ago if you would have asked me if I ever had any nerves or anxiety,” Wise said, “I would have told you with that many freshmen starting there are a lot of nerves.”
This year, Wise has a much better understanding of what kind of team will be taking the court for the Gators, a knowledge that has helped her rest much easier heading into this season and quieted any nerves she felt the season before.
“We know so much more about ourselves,” Wise said. “We didn’t have to wear name tags to know who is which person. We didn’t have to wait and describe how a drill is going to work. We didn’t have to spend as much time on the terminology. We were just moving along much faster. We just told the freshmen to hang on because we are going full speed ahead.”
The Gators will take the first step at full-speed when they take on UNLV Friday at 7 p.m. in the O’Connell Center. It is a rematch of last year’s regular-season finale, which the Gators took in straight sets. The Gators will then take on Colorado on Saturday at 7 p.m. to conclude the Campus USA Credit Union Invitational.
While last year’s team entered the season unsure of how they stood on the volleyball landscape, this year’s version enters the season ranked No. 8 in the preseason polls. That’s what happens when a young team extends the program’s SEC regular-season championship streak to 18 consecutive seasons with a 27-4 record, has a “Sweet 16” NCAA tournament appearance and loses only its two seniors, Kelsey Bowers and Christina Diaz.
If the Gators live up to those expectations, they have a chance to play in front of their own fans in the NCAA regional in Gainesville for the right to head to Tampa for the Final Four, which would be Florida’s first appearance since 2003. But the added experience these Gators have under their belts has taught them to focus on the task at hand and not get ahead of themselves.
“Not particularly,” said senior Kristina Johnson when asked if there was any extra motivation this season. “We have to do well in-season (and win two matches in the first round of the NCAA tournament) to even get to the regionals. I think that’s obviously motivation for us to do well during the season so we can make it there.”
Before thinking ahead to the postseason, Florida knows it has to focus on taking care of business one match at a time and extending that regular-season conference title streak to 19 seasons first.
“One of our main team goals is just winning the SEC,” Johnson said. “It’s never really an expectation for us to win, but it’s always a goal.”
Even though the team is heavy on underclassmen, the players will look to the two seniors, Johnson and Elyse Cusack, to help lead them as far as they can go. The seniors know this is their last chance to win a national championship and will do all they can to make it happen.
“Being a senior, this is my last opportunity to do as well as we can,” Johnson said. “We think we can go pretty far this year.”
That senior leadership role started last year when Cusack took the reigns of the young team and helped guide the ship to yet another successful campaign.
“You can make an argument that last year’s team was Elyse’s team,” Wise said. “She was the mother hen taking in all the young players. The energy that Elyse plays with, the competitiveness and the volleyball IQ, that transcends to all players. Really when she is out there she is the difference-maker.”
But leadership and talent are not the sole ingredients for a team’s ascension to greatness.
Soon after last season ended, the players started working on individual sessions in January to improve their game, a nice change from the season before when many of the players were not even members of the Gators yet.
That work ethic carried over into the summer, when 14 of the 15 players stayed in Gainesville for the entire summer to work together as a unit and improve on the chemistry that developed throughout last season. The only one who was unable to practice over the summer was Brynja Rogers, who was finishing up her classes at New Mexico State before completing her transfer to Florida.
“That’s the first time we’ve ever had that many, and that many for that length of time,” Wise said. “I think it says something about their commitment and how hard they work.”
The Gators will finally get to see the dividends of all their hard work against outside competition on Friday night. It is a moment they have been working toward for the entire year.
“It’s a great opportunity now, after all of the work, for us to play somebody else,” Wise said. “I think the team is at a point where they would have liked to play somebody else much earlier. But the countdown is over. We’re there.”