A Busy Friday - Friday Cardinal Couple

A busy weekend ahead for the various fall sports teams at UofL.

Let's get started with...

Field Hockey

Field Hockey swings out west for a noon local time start with the Cal Bears, which makes a 3pm start EDT.

The Bears are 1-1 on the season, with the best comparison probably being the 5-1 loss they took to Duke.

Duke, being an ACC team, is almost certainly quite a good team, so it's not surprising that they beat Cal, but the 5-1 gives us an idea of how much.

My takeaway is that, if we play well, we should come away with a good solid win.

This UofL team is still coming together, but I think they have the chops at this point to be able to get the win over Cal.  We're not aware of any sort of live stream available for this game, but we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for any posted and will tweet the URL for them.

Soccer

The soccer team gets the annual matchup with Kentucky started tomorrow at 7:30 down in Lexington.

This is a quite good Kentucky soccer team.

They're not ranked, but they have beaten the then-ranked Washington Huskies in a 1-0 match to start the season.  A bit of a head-scratcher, though, they promptly lost a 2-0 game against South Dakota State. Beyond that, they beat a couple of less competitive teams in UNC Greensboro, and Toledo. They hung three on UNC Greensboro, and a whooping seven on Toledo. These two games, along with the super competitive Washington matchup were clean sheets for the Wildcats.

The Cards will be looking to play competitively with a team that is playing a very high level of soccer.

Volleyball

Volleyball has their first home match tomorrow night at 7pm downtown at the KFC Yum! Center.

Starting the home slate with Minnesota worries me quite a bit as they are still looking for their first victory of the season. They have taken two losses in the young season, to Texas A&M and to Stanford. Now, to be fair, those are both excellent volleyball teams with Texas A&M knocking on the door of the Top 25, and Stanford ranked second behind perennial powerhouse Penn State. The Golden Gophers have several offensive weapons in Sarah Wilhite, Daly Santana, and Paige Tapp. They also have at least two setters who can give them solid play in Samantha Seliger-Swenson, and Katie Schau.

I don't know Minnesota volleyball specifically very well, but the Big Ten volleyball tends to be big, slow, and powerful. This will contrast with UofL's small, and quick play, so look for considerable differences in playing style. If you watched any of the live stream last week against Illinois, you may have noticed a similar contrast in playing styles.

Volleyball will continue the ACC/Big Ten challenge Saturday night against a strong Wisconsin team who also has a surprising loss on their record book when they tangled with Western Kentucky on The Badgers home floor. Some of the sting from that loss may have dulled with victories the next day over Colgate, and College of Charleston.

Wisconsin is currently ranked 13th in the nation.

JMcA