Any time you can start your season 12-2, that is impressive.
Doing that in less than a months time, in a sport highly underrated for the stamina and athleticism it requires, that is what champions do, and the Lady Blazers just might be champions.
University Heights Academy’s Volleyball team has not only not played a fifth set with anyone this season, they have only been taken to a fourth set once.
That coming against Heritage Christian on August 23rd.
Moreover, the Lady Blazers have only allowed seven of their fourteen opponents to score twenty or more in a set.
Now yes, there are certainly details to consider. For instance, in the Apollo Summer Slam, teams were playing best two out of three instead of three out of five.
UHA did drop the opening set big to Owensboro 14-25, however to bounce back against a team who you are clearly better than, with two straight set close victories, 25-22 and 15-13, shows resiliency.
Also worth noting, the Lady Blazers played six games in two days. I don’t care how good you are, that is a tall task.
Head Coach Faye Hendricks remarked to me, speaking on the difficulty, that she felt had her teams first game of the tournament not been Trinity and so early in the morning, she felt they could’ve defeated the Lady Raiders and walked away from the tourney 5-1.
Instead UHA left 4-2, suffering their only two losses this season, the other being to Logan County, in that tightly compacted tournament format.
In fact, one could argue, that the only times we have seen them struggle were when they were faced with some form of fatigue. Be it waking up early for a tournament knowing you will play six games in two days, or coming to the end of fourteen games in three weeks.
When I stated that Christian County gave UHA “all they could handle” I maybe should’ve done a better job clarifying the statement.
The Lady Colonels were one of only three teams who scored more than twenty points in two or more sets. That is how dominant this Lady Blazer team has been. Even when they give up twenty plus in a set within a game, they only do it twice in a game a little over twenty percent of the time.
That is why the Lady Colonels earned that statement, because in comparison to most everyone else UHA has played, and seemingly will play in the regular season, they did in fact give the Lady Blazers “all they could handle” and yes, as Twitter pointed out, they “handled it just fine.”
As of tomorrow UHA will have had a week off that included a long weekend and limited practice in an effort to rest and recoup.
If we want to see what this team looks like well rested, but in midseason form, we won’t have to go far.
After that week off the Lady Blazers will take a short trip to Todd County to play Central tomorrow, and I for one am very much looking forward to seeing the result.