Tennessee volleyball returned home from a three-game road swing Wednesday night, but struggled against an unranked Florida team. Coming off the team\u2019s 2-1 trip with victories over LSU and Ole Miss, the Lady Vols saw their momentum halted as the Gators upset Tennessee 3-2 in five sets.<\/p>\n
The No. 16 Lady Vols (13-3, 4-2 SEC) were halted by a stout Gators defense that has improved this season and helped Florida to win back-to-back matches against Missouri and Vanderbilt.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just kind of one of those nights where a lot of things didn\u2019t seem to go our way, and it looked like a lot of stuff was hard,\u201d Rackham Watt said. \u201cKind of uncharacteristic of this team, but again, Florida is a good team, so they exposed some things.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lady Vols\u2019 trio of Hayden Kubik, Paityn Chapman and Chelsea Sutton continues to highlight match after match, particularly in conference play, despite the loss to Florida. Wednesday night, they combined for 42 kills on 124 attacks, seven blocks and 56.5 total points.<\/p>\n
Kubik once again stole the show for Tennessee against Florida, racking up 24 kills on 60 attacks and 25 total points. Her remarkable season continued as she leads the team with 214 kills, 502 attacks and is sixth on the team with 19 blocks so far this season.<\/p>\n
After a quick start by taking the first set, Tennessee endured a slew of miscommunications, mental lapses and compounded mistakes against a hot Gators\u2019 offense, dropping the next two sets en route to the loss.<\/p>\n
Florida did not make things easy on the Lady Vols all night, taking the second set and forcing a fourth set by capitalizing on key mistakes from Tennessee to steal the momentum. The Gators rode the second set momentum to a dominant third set win that put the Lady Vols on their heels.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started OK, and then it just kind of slipped,\u201d Rackham Watt said. \u201cBut certainly in the sense that we lost our offense was just kind of nonexistent.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defensively, the Lady Vols struggled against the Gators as the offense fell quiet. An uncharacteristic night on both sides of the ball for the Lady Vols resulted in a rare loss for just the third time this season and second time in the span of a week, with the team\u2019s road loss to Texas on Oct. 8.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to continue to talk to our team about staying aggressive,\u201d Rackham Watt said. \u201cIt\u2019s just that the connection wasn\u2019t quite there tonight, for whatever reason, but our strength has been in our offense; it\u2019s been something I think we\u2019ve been pretty good at all year, it just wasn\u2019t there tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lady Vols saw five players record 10 or more digs in the loss to Florida, showcasing the depth Rackham Watt has talked about all season.<\/p>\n
Caroline Kerr continues to be the defensive leader of the team, notching 57 assists and 15 digs for the night. Her presence in the back court has been a key cog in the Lady Vols\u2019 success this season.<\/p>\n
With nine matches left in the regular season, the Lady Vols will begin the postseason push with six of the final nine coming at home. The Lady Vols will host Auburn on Sunday at 1 p.m. ET in another high-profile SEC matchup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tennessee volleyball returned home from a three-game road swing Wednesday night, but struggled against an unranked Florida team.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6027,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6607,6605,28,30,29,6604,6603,6606,6602],"class_list":["post-6026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-chelsea-sutton","tag-eve-rackham-watt","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-hayden-kubik","tag-lady-vols-volleyball","tag-paityn-chapman","tag-tennessee-volleyball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}