The ninth-ranked Florida Gators volleyball team has kicked its gear into overdrive the past few weeks, steamrolling opponents to the tune of six consecutive sweeps entering Friday night’s match.
With the way Mary Wise’s Gators have been playing, it wasn’t surprising that they were able to claim their seventh straight sweep against Georgia (25-16, 25-20, 25-14).
What was surprising was that somehow the Gators were able to shift their well-oiled machine to an even higher gear en route to putting together perhaps their best offensive performance of the season.
Florida came out of the gates with guns blazing, with seemingly every swing hitting its mark. The Gators hit a sizzling .583 in the first set and didn’t cool off as they ended at .474 for the entire match, their season-highs for a set and a match.
“Consistency is always a big thing that we try to work on,” Kristi Jaeckel said. “Taking big swings that are high risk, but also making sure you make the right shot at the same time.”
The Gators certainly made every shot look like the right shot, but even they were surprised at how efficiently they attacked the ball. Florida has been a team that hasn’t been afraid to take the big swing first and ask questions later, but it hadn’t done it to the tune of only six errors in a match all season, besting their old season-low of nine in a match.
Senior Kristina Johnson seemed taken aback when told of the team’s relatively error-free ways, “Wow, did we really only have six errors in the match?” It was a question she asked her teammates not once, but twice after the match.
Even more impressive was the fact that the Gators didn’t hit a single error in the first set, the first time they achieved that feat all season.
Johnson and sophomores Kelly Murphy and Jaeckel all looked at each other and said in unison that they couldn’t remember ever not committing an error throughout an entire set before laughing at the thought.
The Gators have in fact done it before, but it doesn’t come along very often, as they were only able to do it once last season as well, with that one coming against Auburn.
As the team was in the midst of putting everything together offensively, it seemed like the entire team played a cog in the engine.
The Gators’ errors were sprinkled across the board, with no player committing more than one error in the match.
Setters Murphy and Brynja Rodgers, who had 17 and 19 assists respectively, took the same approach, sprinkling the assists evenly across the board. After kill leaders Murphy (12) and Jaeckel (11), the wealth was spread pretty evenly, as three players (Johnson, Colleen Ward and Cassandra Anderson) had five kills apiece and Callie Rivers chipped in four.
Even more impressive than the distribution of kills was the fact that the Gators were doing it while neutralizing Georgia’s blocking.
“We showed really good patience because Georgia has been blocking extremely well as of late,” Wise said. “For us to only be blocked twice, I think kind of reflects some of the maturing process of our offense.”
And when they weren’t busy spiking the ball, it seemed like Georgia was playing Russian roulette with Florida’s servers. Unfortunately for Georgia, it seemed like every server had a live round, as six Gators took turns knocking home a service ace on the night, led by Anderson’s three.
Wise has been working all season long to mold her team’s service lineup into one that does not have any holes the opposition can pitch around.
“We’ve always wanted to be a team that on any given server going back we can make a run,” Wise said. “We haven’t always had that. We have different players that are capable of doing it now. The fact that six different players served an ace is pretty good.”
Florida’s offensive fireworks came against a team they just faced a few weeks back, an advantage that the Gators completely exploited.
“We just played Georgia a few weeks ago,” Johnson said. “So we were familiar with their team and their primary hitters and stuff. We had a game plan and we tried to execute it as well as possible and we did.”
Even though the Gators swept the Bulldogs the first time around, Wise was a little surprised at how easily Florida was able to dispatch Georgia.
“Georgia had been playing really well of late since we last saw them,” Wise said. “We felt the Georgia team we were going to play tonight was much improved from the first time around. Fortunately we brought much of our A-game today.”
The Gators have shown that they are adept at adjusting to what their opponents bring to the table. Their last five sweeps have come against teams they faced earlier in the season.
“I think it always helps when you play teams twice,” Johnson said. “We just try to remember what they did last time and what we did last time. We just see what we can do better to win.”
The Gators know that the other team is taking the same approach, but they will admit that sometimes beating an opponent the first time around can cause a team to take things for granted.
“At the same time, I think it can be hard the second time around,” Jaeckel said. “You can get complacent and you have to know that they are going to play way harder than they did the first time.”
The way the Gators are playing lately, they have shown that no matter how much their opponent steps up their game, they will take theirs to another level.