It seems like nothing can stop the ninth-ranked Florida Gators volleyball team from demolishing its opponents lately, not even the news that one of the key contributors wouldn’t be able to play in Sunday’s match against the Auburn Tigers.
About 30 minutes before the game, coach Mary Wise found out that junior setter Brynja Rodgers, who is second on the team with 5.57 assists per set and had only sat out one set all season prior to Sunday, would not be able to go due to back spasms.
“She woke up and was a little bit tight and it just got worse,” Wise said. “All indications are that it was just a bad night sleep and she will be fine tomorrow. As we know with your back, it’s just one of those freaky things you don’t expect.”
The bad news did not even remotely throw the Gators off their game, as they rolled to their eighth consecutive sweep by downing the Tigers 25-15, 25-18, 25-13.
Florida went to a 5-1 formation for the match, featuring sophomore Kelly Murphy at setter. The team runs the formation a lot in practice and has done it at points during the season, but they have never had to rely on it for an entire match until Rodgers went down. Knowing that the team can turn to that formation for entire periods of time will help the Gators become more formidable.
“I thought the team responded great, learning about it at the last minute,” Wise said. ”I think it’s taking a negative and turning it into a positive. Now when we go to it for an entire match, we’ll be that much better because of it.”
Murphy ran the offense flawlessly, dishing out 30 assists, while also contributing four kills and five digs.
“Today, I can’t remember a single time Kelly passed a ball that wasn’t hittable,” Wise said. “It might not always have always been killable, but there was only one mistimed play between her and KJ (senior Kristina Johnson) and we could argue whose fault that was.”
Even without Rodgers in the lineup, the Gators committed only four hitting errors, breaking their season-best of six that they set on Friday night against Georgia. Florida hit .430 as a team and didn’t allow Auburn to record a single block the entire match.
Coming into the weekend, Florida’s lowest error total on the season was nine, and even Wise could not recall the last time one of her teams was able to coast through a weekend so close to being error-free.
Florida’s red-hot streak was impressive enough already, but knowing that the Gators’ opponents aren’t getting very many free points against them makes them very formidable.
“It makes it a lot easier on us,” Murphy said. “It doesn’t just give them points. That way they have to earn their points. It just makes the game a lot easier.”
The Gators’ new error-free ways have come as the result of working a lot harder to make the right shots. That means not trying to spike the shot as hard as possible and being patient in looking for the best opportunity to put points on the board.
“I think we’ve worked a lot harder to make something happen,” said sophomore Kristy Jaeckel. “The setters have done a great job of set location, but we don’t have a lot of trouble with having to make errors on balls that we don’t need to. It’s making it easier for hitters to make plays.”
Jaeckel and fellow sophomore Colleen Ward led the offensive attack with 10 and 12 kills, respectively.
Jaeckel also took her turn as the go-to server for the match on a team that has turned into a strong serving team on which basically everyone is capable of going on runs.
When Florida faced an early 10-4 deficit in the second set with basically nothing going right, Wise called a timeout and soon Jaeckel stepped up to serve. At the end of her service run, the Gators had tied the score at 12 and had stolen all the momentum to help them go on a 21-8 run to end the set.
During the timeout, Wise made sure the team focused on not making any preventable mistakes. The one thing they were not focused on was trying to keep their consecutive set streak going.
“More of our focus was on eliminating the errors we were making,” Jaeckel said. “We’re not really focusing on keeping the streak going. We just wanted to win that game.”
In fact, junior Callie Rivers claimed that she did not even know the Gators were in the midst of running their streak to 24 consecutive sets. She said her focus was on the moment and helping her team come back to win the current set.
“I didn’t even know we had a consecutive set streak going,” Rivers said. “We just tried to find a way to come back from this.”
As the Gators did come back and keep the sweep streak alive, they have set themselves up to be well-rested going into the late-season stretch run. Coming into the match, Florida had only played 77 sets on the season, with the next closest teams playing 10 more than that.
That rest will certainly come in handy for the Gators who will be facing LSU, the team that defeated the Gators in straight sets prior to their current winning streak, on Friday. After that, the Gators go on the road to face Tennessee and Kentucky before returning home to play South Carolina.
“Tomorrow is when we are going to turn the page,” Jaeckel said. “There are always things we can improve on from this weekend. So we’ll look at that.”
If the Gators continue improving and playing as well as they have on their current streak, then the end of that page will have at least a claim to a share of the SEC championship.
But as they know they won’t get there unless they take it one match at a time and not worry about keeping streaks alive.