Now there is only one team with an unblemished record.
Let's run down the action from yesterday.
Football
UofL Football's season is underway.
Next topic.
Volleyball
On the Cardinal Couple Radio Hour yesterday, I suggested that if Florida played like they playedFriday night, we could win this game. They didn't.
The Florida Gators came into the match last night ranked 4th in the country, and likely to fall when the rankings come out tomorrow due to their Friday loss to #7 Southern Cal.
Florida didn't look like a top five team, but neither did they look like the nearly inept team we saw Friday night. They improved their play enough to win the match 25-20, 23-25, 25-18, 25-22.
The Cards certainly had their issues in this match, and frankly, if they had played like we know they're capable of playing, they probably would've won this game. Even with some egregious problems showing up in the stats, two of the sets were quite close, and the other two were hardly blowouts.
Most egregious was the 16 service errors. That's 16 points just given to Florida as gifts, and cleaning that up to even just a tolerable 4 or 5 might've been enough to swing the match to UofL's favor. The Cardinals attack was not very distributed, though the foundation was still in place. Melanie McHenry put down 14, Jasmine Bennett got 13 in the middle, Megan Sloan continues to demonstrate her offensive prowess with 11, and Amanda Greene wasn't far from double digits with eight. After that, though, the next highest kill stat on the page is Wilma Rivera with two setter dumps. Credit Florida for keeping UofL out of system to a great degree with Molly Sauer only getting 11 digs, and Kelly O'Neil kept to nine. Wilma Rivera also passed nine, which is a credit to her, but a mixed blessing for the team as it takes her out of setting duties for the play.
The bright spot for the Cards is probably the blocking stats, with eight team blocks, with Amanda Greene and Jasmine Bennett accounting for the greatest share of those with Bennett contributing to five stops, and Greene getting in on four. Jasmine also picked up a solo block to add to the total.
We knew this weekend of play would be tough, and it's not over yet, with the VolleyCards facing currently 7th ranked Southern Cal. With their win over Florida on Friday, they're poised to climb in the rankings, and will want to protect that by sealing the weekend with the win over the Cards. The Cards will need to tear off the rear-view mirror and come out refreshed, rejuvenated and ready to play volleyball the way we know they can.Field Hockey
The teams played to a scoreless halftime, but the Cards would get the scoring started early in the second frame, with Mackenzie Karl working through traffic into the circle and then shooting a cross to Katie Schneider to score her first career goal. UMass Lowell would equalize 12 minutes later.
The final goal of the game came 5 minutes after on a Louisville penalty corner. Carter Ayers inserted, with Katie Walsh providing the stop, setting up the older sister Meghan Schneider for the goal (and, yes, sometimes Field Hockey counts two levels of assists, so Carter Ayers does get an assist credit for this one).
Coach Sowry was disappointed in some aspects of the play, and owned some fault for preparation on penalty corners, so there are certainly aspects for improvement available.
After the game, the Cards traveled north to Newark, DE to play the Blue Hens tomorrow at 1 p.m. There is a Youtube link for the video on this one. It links to the UDBlueHens Youtube account that does show a scheduled live event for 1 p.m. tomorrow, so again, we have good vibes for being able to watch this event live as well.
Cardinal Couple Radio Hour
Speaking of live video and terrible segue ways, the Cardinal Couple Radio Hour was live on Facebook streaming yesterday, as we have been of late. We missed two of the normal knuckleheads with Case off being a farmer, or something like that, and Jared was down in Orlando overloading Instagram feeds with sappy pictures of Katy and Disney World.
We did have two wonderful guests in studio with us. Daryl Faust of Ky Women Talk Sports joined us as did the man with five, and counting, first names, Mike Keith Gilpatrick from River City Cards. We had a good discussion, talked about Volleyball, Women's Soccer, and a bit of Football. We even had a slight bit of a tutorial about how to see all of the events on UofL's combined schedule page (click the plus on the day's entry to expand out all of the events).
You can check out the Facebook Live video at:
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JMcA
Wow, a rough start to football season but it shows where Louisville is and what they need to do. Congrats to FH and good try Volleyball. Go Cards, beat Purdue.
ReplyDeleteCurtis "Not laboring this weekend" Franklin
In volleyball, we had to play FL coming off a loss (to USC), yesterday. Now else have to play USC coming off a loss (and probably the biggest upset of the season), as they lost to UCF last night. Not ideal.
ReplyDeleteThis WILL be a very good Volleyball squad and they are getting some great early season/tough opponent experience this weekend that will pay dividends later in the schedule.
ReplyDeleteMaybe like football...but I do the the upside on Volleyball is much higher than it is for Football in long term success.
Paulie
I’ve managed to catch a bit of both volleyball matches before today (UCF & Florida) and the sole Women’s soccer match while here. Both look good with promising seasons. I was in person at football through about the 44-7 point in which we left. There were good points in the game, especially for playing against Bama.
ReplyDeleteCongrats to FH & WSoc on the victories this weekend. Rough losses to great teams for volleyball but a good win against the Knights. Holding your own against top teams is good and DBK’s VolleyCards have nothing to hang their heads about.