As of game-time today (second round play plus Wisconsin’s Sweet 16 victory last night), the 6 Big Ten teams had not even lost a set. But our Gophers managed to lose 3 sets (the 2nd, 4th & 5th) to a spirited but unseeded and not obviously-overpowering Pittsburgh. How disappointing!
Maybe Pittsburgh, who hasn’t lost a match since October, is better than they look; we’ll find out tomorrow. McGraw didn’t play; maybe the back-up plan of Kilkelly at libero and Wenaas at D.S. wasn’t as solid a replacement as I thought it would be. One of our two losses on the season came at Lincoln in a match that started even earlier than today’s match at noon; maybe the Gophers are just not a Morning in Nebraska team.
But the most likely explanation is the weaknesses I pointed out last week in my piece HOW GOOD ARE THE GOPHERS? I told you that the Gophers had excellent outside hitting. And while our OH-trio of Samedy, Landfair & Rollins have each had better matches, they were good today, with 23, 15, & 15 kills respectively, and you shouldn’t lose a match when your outside hitters put up 53 kills. And the blocking wasn’t bad either; I have Pittman in double figures. The blocking and outside hitting was good enough to win most matches.
But the Gophers got virtually zero offense from the middle. I don’t think Pittman and Rubright had 5 kills between the two of them. And it wasn’t their fault; they got hardly any sets. Shaffmaster is pretty good setting her middles off a perfect pass, and a quicker, more talented setter (e.g., Seliger-Swenson) might have done more with the mediocre passes Shaffmaster was getting. But a mediocre serve-receive and a big, slow setter is a bad combination.
Our serve-receivers weren’t giving up aces or shanking their receives out of bounds, but they weren’t putting them where Shaffmaster wanted them either. I wasn’t keeping track, but I would swear that Shaffmaster was making the first set underhand more often than overhand, because she had to run 15 feet to reach it. And underhand setting pretty much eliminates middle-hitting. In high-level collegiate volleyball, the receiving team wins the majority of the points because they have the advantage of the first attack; but the Gophers were returning free-balls and giving Pittsburgh the first attack, even on their serve, more often or not.
NEXT YEAR
The old reliable consolation to a season-ending loss is “Wait to next year.” In this odd, pandemic year, “next year” is only 4 months away. I’ll have more to say about “next year” after I’ve recovered emotionally.