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The normal trio of women's fall sports are all in action today as we are approaching, or are already started into, post-season play.

Soccer

The women get the post-season underway first.  They are playing Virginia in Charlottesville in the quarterfinals (also first round) of the ACC tournament.  This is the first appearance in the ACC tournament for the Cards.  Of course, UofL has only been in the ACC for a handful of years, now, but it speaks to the quality of this year's team to even make an appearance in the conference tournament of one of the best women's soccer conferences in the country.

It also speaks to the quality of the conference that the last regular season game of decided for the Cards between a 3rd seed in the tournament, or the 6th seed that we ended up with.  Yes, the conference standings were that bunched up near the top.  Virginia ended up with that 3rd seed, and the two will tangle today at 1 p.m..

If the Cards advance, they'll move to Cary, NC where the rest of the tournament will be played.  The potential opponents for that one are Florida State and Duke.

UVA did claim the regular season victory over the Cardinals this season, in a 1-0 Thursday night matchup on October 4th.  The Cards did have several good shots during the game but were unable to keep them on-frame and slip by the UVA GK.

Field Hockey

Justine Sowry's squad wraps up their regular season today with a non-conference matchup at Kent State.  This one is a noon start.  There is a streaming URL listed for this one:

https://boxcast.tv/view/kent-state-field-hockey-vs-louisville-102818-420314

It does not appear to require any subscription.

Kent State is a decent mid-major team.  They 7-10 overall, 5-1 in the MAC, but don't let that record fool you, 6 of those 7 loses were to teams that were top 25 ranked.

This one faces off at noon.

Despite the overall regular season being concluded, the regular season conference play has all been completed, so the ACC tournament seedings are already known.  Louisville will be going into the tournament as a 3 seed, playing 6 seed Wake Forest.  Wake Forest took the regular season tilt 4-2.  Potential 2nd round opponents are Syracuse and Duke.  Both of these matches gave us plenty of drama, including some bonus field hockey.  The match against Syracuse was a victory for the Cards, the game winning coming with 23 seconds left on the clock in 2nd sudden-victory overtime period.  The match against Duke was a barn-burner, completing both 7v7 overtime periods, and going into an extended shoot-out to decide.

Volleyball

Unlike field hockey and soccer, volleyball still has several weeks of regular season play.  Part of this is because the ACC doesn't have a post-season tournament, so there's an extra week of regular season play.

Today, the wide netters will be facing the Syracuse Orange.  Former Cardinals head coach Leonid Yelin is at the helm of Syracuse these days, so he will be visiting a familiar location in Cardinal Arena for the 1 p.m. start.  This will be on ACC Network Extra.

Syracuse sits at 8-3 in conference, which puts them in roughly the top quarter of the conference.  Overall they're 12-7.  Notable loses are to BYU, Southern Cal, Marquette, and Pitt, all ranked teams (BYU is still undefeated and sits as the #1 team in the country).  They also lost in a sweep to Notre Dame Friday, so they're coming in to Cardinal Arena off a loss, which is never ideal.

Syracuse, courtesy of Yelin, is a very "at the net" sort of team.  Expect their emphasis of play to be at the net with blocking and hitting.  There is a single player listed on their roster as a DS, everyone else is listed as a hitter (middle, rightside, outside), or setter.  Also, as typical for Yelin, there's a strong international aspect to this team, with players from the Ukraine, Israel, Greece, Yelin's native Uzbekistan, Canada, and Russia.

I imagine UofL's goal in this match will be to be strong in defense (both blocking and digging), stay in system, and get good swings on the ball, with the intent of putting Syracuse out of system so they can't bring their offense to bear.

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JMcA