Why even UK fans who don’t follow volleyball were moved by the Cats’ national title
Other than seeing good-guy Craig Skinner reap the rewards of 16 long years of labor as Kentucky volleyball coach, the best thing about UK winning the NCAA Women’s Volleyball Tournament national title Saturday night was the timing.
“Skinner’s winners” (as Tweeter Ronald Isham refers to the Wildcats’ volleyball players) gave Cats backers a burst of light after what has been a remarkably trying stretch.
In recent years, it has seemed that “To An Athlete Dying Young” has become a haunting specter hanging over University of Kentucky Athletics.
It was April 2019 when ex-UK gymnast Shelby Hilton died after a multi-year battle with brain cancer. She was 25.
Last year, Kentucky golfer Cullan Brown passed from the effects of bone cancer. He was 20.
The current school year has been brutal for UK Athletics.
Football assistant John Schlarman died in November after battling cancer of the bile ducts. He was 45.
Baseball player and former UK basketball walk-on Ben Jordan died unexpectedly in January. He was 22.
Then came last week’s devastating news that Kentucky freshman men’s basketball player Terrence Clarke had been killed in a car wreck in Los Angeles where he had gone to prepare for the 2021 NBA Draft.
Clarke was 19.
There was also the debilitating stroke suffered by Chris Oats that has left the Kentucky football linebacker facing a major medical rehabilitation task ahead.
Obviously, no sports championship even remotely mitigates the tragedies of so many young lives cut short.
But having something to feel good about after such a trying time is part, I think, of why Kentucky backers are always going to have a uniquely special feeling attached to UK’s first volleyball national title.
Kentucky’s 3-1 victory over Texas for the national crown was only the latest breakthrough in what has been a remarkable year of achievement for UK women athletes and their teams.
Led by sophomore star Mary Tucker, the Kentucky rifle team — comprised of both women and men — won its third national title in March.
Earning two NCAA team championships in one school year is a University of Kentucky first.
The national titles came after the Kentucky women’s swimming and diving team in February gave UK the first Southeastern Conference championship in that sport in UK history.
Tucker and senior volleyball star setter Madison Lilley have given UK two National Players of the Year in their respective sports for 2020-21.
Rhyne Howard, the Kentucky women’s basketball star, was a finalist for various National Player of the Year honors and a consensus First Team All-America selection as a junior.
The most scintillating individual performance by a UK athlete this season has come from women’s track and field sprint star Abby Steiner.
In winning the NCAA Indoor 200 meters, the junior from Dublin, Ohio, tied the all-time collegiate record by running :22.38 — the second-fastest indoor 200 meters ever run in the United State and the fifth-fastest ever run in the world.
Over Mitch Barnhart’s long tenure as Kentucky athletics director, the most impressive achievement is the elevation of women’s athletics to such a point that UK female athletes are now routinely producing so many special moments.
During a school year in which the Kentucky football team went 5-6 and the men’s basketball team was historically bad at 9-16, the UK women’s athletes and teams have salvaged the Wildcats’ sports honor for 2020-21.
In our impatient sports era, it’s hard not to wonder if there is a lesson to be learned in Skinner leading Kentucky to the women’s volleyball national title in his 16th year as Wildcats head coach.
After choosing Kentucky over Iowa State to launch his head-coaching career in 2005, Skinner immediately elevated what had been a struggling UK program into an NCAA Tournament regular.
The Cats have never missed the postseason in the Skinner era.
However, before this season, Kentucky had made it past the round of 16 only one time under Skinner — a run to the Elite Eight in 2017.
Let’s be blunt: A UK men’s basketball coach whose program seemed to have hit a sweet 16 plateau would not be around long enough to break through and win it all in year 16.
Obviously, coaching expectations vary based on the traditional levels of success of individual programs and, to again be blunt, the amount of money riding on success or failure.
It’s easier for a university to stay patient in so-called non-revenue sports than it is in the sports that pay the bills, football and men’s basketball.
Even allowing for that, it’s hard not to wonder if universities wouldn’t be better off sticking with coaches longer.
On Saturday night, UK’s 16 years worth of investment in Craig Skinner yielded a national championship that came at the most opportune time imaginable for a fan base in stark need of a moment of light.
This story was originally published April 26, 2021 at 3:05 PM.
