Kentucky volleyball shakes off slow start, advances to NCAA championship match
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky overcame a first-set collapse and beat Wisconsin 3-2 to reach final.
- Kentucky relied on 'UFO' resets and key kills from Hudson and DeLeye in fifth set.
- Kentucky will face Texas A&M for the national championship on ABC Sunday.
Sometimes, the best way to win is to forget about the frustration, miscommunication and lost points, and force yourself to keep going.
With a 3-2 (12-25, 25-22, 21-25, 26-24, 15-13) defeat of No. 3 seed Wisconsin on Thursday in the NCAA Tournament national semifinal match, No. 1 Kentucky did just that, overcoming a sluggish start to reach a Sunday title tilt with Texas A&M.
From the first play of the first set — when junior libero Molly Tuozzo served the ball into the net — the Wildcats looked out of sync. They fell behind 15-6 and never found a rhythm.
“It was, everyone’s angry,” UK coach Craig Skinner said of his team’s start. “We’re upset, and, you know, it’s unfortunate. I basically said, ‘Congrats guys, we couldn’t have played any worse.’ And it was honest, and (Wisconsin) played great. But the only thing we could do is flush it and move on to the next set.”
But Kentucky (30-2) has a way of righting the ship. With the national semifinal win, the Cats improved to a Division I-best 8-1 on the season after losing the first set.
“We have a saying called ‘UFO’,” Tuozzo said. “It’s kind of just like the point happens, forget about it, next ball. And that’s the great thing about volleyball. There’s 25 points in a set. So I think they’re an amazing team. Props to them, and they made some plays, and we just had to move on.”
It never got easy.
The Badgers bested Kentucky in hit percentage, .375 to .254. In kills, 77-65. In blocks, 10-8 In digs, 69-55. In side-out percentage (rally victories when receiving the other team’s serve), 71.7% to 65.1%. Kentucky committed five more attack errors and one more block error than Wisconsin.
“I’m trying to find stats that we actually led in this match,” Skinner said. “...The cool thing about this (Kentucky) team, I thought we’d done it all, and I thought we’d found every way possible to win. And tonight was a different way.”
It started with a bounce back from the ugly first set. UK tied things up at 1 -1 on the strength of a much stronger start to the second set, getting a helping hand in the form of six Wisconsin service errors, a match high for either team.
Regardless of what they call similar transgressions in Madison, Wisconsin, the third set proved that coach Kelly Sheffield’s team can disregard UFOs, too.
Wisconsin (28-5) opened the third set with a 12-7 lead before Skinner called a much-needed timeout.
After trailing the Badgers for the majority of the set, Kentucky decreased the lead with a 3-0 scoring run, and battled back and forth to pull within one late. A consequential successful challenge by Sheffield created separation, shifting what was a 22-22 tie to a 23-21 advantage.
Kentucky middle blocker Lizzie Carr would commit an attack error, Wisconsin outside hitter Una Vajagic delivered a deadly kill and the Badgers took the third set, 25-21, on a 3-0 scoring run of their own.
“They have so many great hitters on this team,” Tuozzo said. “So our mindset was just like, ‘They’re here for a reason. They’re going to get some amazing kills. They’re going to bounce balls. They’re going to stuff some balls. So I think just, moving on.”
Between sets, UK outside hitter Eva Hudson said, the Wildcats come together and re-center in a physical attempt to move forward, win or lose.
“(We) look at one another in the eyes,” Hudson said. “Which kind of seems like a dumb thing, but you don’t really do that too often when it’s such a fast-paced game. So taking the time to, like, say, ‘I got you,’ to each and every teammate really kind of brings that unity back into the team aspect.”
It’s surely not that the Wildcats lacked unity — or compassion for one another — in the first three sets.
But over the course of the fourth — and the Kentucky-forced fifth — it became clear that whatever plagued the team was not going to hold it back from a chance to compete for a national title.
“I just think we came out a little timid and not knowing what to do in the first set,” Hudson said. “And slowly found our rhythm in the second and third. But by the fourth and fifth, we really, we found that rhythm. And I don’t know, I’m just swinging away and knew my people behind me were covering.”
In the fourth set, the Wildcats posted their best statistics of the night, recording 16 kills, two aces and four blocks. In the fifth — a match that, until the challengers switched sides of the net, never appeared to be within the Badgers’ reach — Kentucky broke open a 9-3 lead, and posted 11 kills, an ace and a block.
But Wisconsin would not go down without a fight, and Skinner wouldn’t have expected it to.
Skinner met Sheffied decades ago in Muncie, Indiana, and the two have long understood the importance of resilience in the sport. Each team displayed it Thursday, and afterward Skinner said he told Sheffield and Wisconsin assistant coach John Shondell — another old buddy from Muncie — that their work building these Badgers and guiding them to the Final Four was “the best coaching job that those guys have done.”
But Skinner’s squad has managed all season to battle back from adversity, and Thursday was no exception.
Looking unrecognizable from the duo that struggled in the first set — combining for just five kills in 21 attempts — Hudson and Kansas City area native and first-team All-America outside hitter Brooklyn DeLeye delivered critical kills to keep the team’s national-championship-berth hopes alive.
As with several Kentucky set points throughout the match, Wisconsin answered when the Wildcats reached 14 points in the deciding set, recording consecutive kills and prompting a Skinner timeout with UK leading 14-13.
Hudson sealed the match victory with one final kill, and Kentucky proved that the shortcomings were simply UFOs.
“The grit piece has just been there all along,” DeLeye said. “I think that just comes from practice. Every day, we’re just wanting to get better, and I think we’ve just done a good job in not forgetting why, or how, we got here.”
The job isn’t finished, what with conference-mate Texas A&M looming in Sunday’s championship following a 3-0 (29-27, 25-21, 25-20) sweep of No. 1 Pittsburgh in the first national semifinal.
But in the post-match press conference, Skinner was, once again, pleasantly surprised by his Wildcats and their ability to perform when they step on the court.
“The way they play it, and the heart that they show is immeasurable,” he said. “And I keep telling them, they’re transformational leaders in the way to go about it, in what they’ve done for the sport, especially in Kentucky, but not only there, around the country.”
The Wildcats will face Texas A&M for the national championship at 3:30 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC.
This story was originally published December 19, 2025 at 3:31 AM.
