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Kentucky Volleyball Ends Vanderbilt's 9-0 Start
Vanderbilt took the first set off No. 3 Kentucky and lost the next three. Eight of their nine wins had come against teams nobody had ranked.
Vanderbilt were 9-0 and had played exactly one ranked opponent in getting there.
At Memorial Gymnasium on Wednesday, in the first week of the conference season, they played the third-ranked team in the country, won the opening set, and lost the next three.
Kentucky took it 3-1 (21-25, 25-17, 25-19, 25-21), which puts them at 9-2 and Vanderbilt at 9-1. Ranks throughout are from the AVCA coaches poll of 21 September.
Vanderbilt have already matched last season's entire win total, and they have done it in ten matches rather than twenty-seven.
Eight of Nine Wins Came Against Unranked Teams
The ranked opponent was No. 18 North Carolina, beaten in four at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York on 13 September, on a floor laid inside a Manhattan music hall.
The other eight wins came against teams nobody had ranked at all.
None of that is a criticism of a programme that went 9-18 last season, in its first year back after forty-five years without a team. The schedule is simply the reason a 9-0 record could not tell anybody very much about Vanderbilt, and the reason one Wednesday in September could.
Vanderbilt Hit .273 and Blocked Almost Nothing
Vanderbilt hit .273 for the match with 54 kills and 42 digs, which is a good night against most teams and was a losing one here.
Samantha Wunsch had 16 kills, Reese Animashaun 13 on a .281 clip, Rachel Ogunleye 7 at .500 and Hailee Mack 13 digs. Maddy Bowser killed eight of the nine balls she swung at and missed with none of them.
Three total blocks is the number that decided it. Kentucky had beaten Louisville in four three days earlier and arrived with a front row Vanderbilt could not get a hand on, and .273 is what a team hits when the other side is not touching the ball on the way past.
We cannot set Kentucky's figures beside any of it. Kentucky have published no account of this match, their opponent's box score page does not render to us, and the only numbers available from Wednesday night are therefore the losing side's.
The Losing Margin Narrowed Every Set
Vanderbilt scored 17, then 19, then 21 in the three sets they lost.
A margin narrowing by two points a set is the shape of a team working something out in real time, against a side sitting two places off the top of the poll, in a gym where Vanderbilt had not lost all year.
Vanderbilt won a set from the third-ranked team in the country in their own building.
That is the most useful thing the first ten matches of their season have told anybody, and it is worth more than the nine wins that came before it.
