Wisconsin volleyball is not in a great place to start the season with two straight losses against top-5 opponents and falling to 1-3 on the season. There's a lot of complexity that goes into these losses and how the Badgers are receiving them, and even analyzing the one win against No. 7 Louisville. It's a bit of a tangle with injuries playing a part, scheduling, and youthfulness.
Kelly Sheffield was blunt about it all after the match, getting swept by No. 4 Pitt: "It’s a match that we gifted them a lot of points, and part of that is our youth, and part of that is, I think, the pressure that your opponent puts on you and how you manage that." Kelly Sheffield continues, "They play really smart with the long rallies. They don’t force things that aren’t there. They live to see another day, and we’re not quite at that spot right now."
It seems like Sheffield stumbled onto something there at the end of his quote; the Badgers just aren't there yet. We wrote about the "4 problems with Wisconsin volleyball after a frustrating loss to Stanford" a couple of days ago, and all of those are still true.
Injuries, youth, errors, and schedule is really costing the Wisconsin Badgers so far this season
This team isn't healthy at all. Not having Grace Egan or Jaela Auguste against a potential national championship team in Pitt is brutal. Both are veteran stars who know how to lift a team and score a lot of points. Yet neither was available; this is the second time for Auguste and the first for Egan.
Add in the fact that Grace Lopez is still working her way back. She did play some front row but clearly wasn't going to be thrown to the sharks. She was used a bit more sparingly than what a Badger fan may see in two months or even two weeks.
While Sheffield didn't blame the injuries, that's a real problem. Though he did mention the youth and the problem with a bunch of young but extremely talented players on the court at the same time is...errors. The Badgers were full of them AGAIN. Sheffield addressed this: "I thought we, across the board, had a lot of errors. We gave a lot of points away, and nobody's really happy with that."
He's not wrong; there were 24 attack errors. That's not a typo... 24 attack errors. It was mostly the younger players like Thompson with seven and Flanagan with five. Lopez, who's working her way back, had five also.
Add in the fact that this schedule has been brutal. I'm on the record that this is good for volleyball and should continue into future years, but it's tough for Wisconsin right now when they are trying to get the freshmen acclimated to college volleyball and the timing of the injuries. It's just hard to have your best stuff when it's a shuffle each and every game.
Sheffield also said he's still trying to figure out the lineups and how to make this team click and work together. It's been brutal. He basically benched Eva Travis today after the last couple of matches have been full of errors, and she doesn't have the excuse of being a freshman. He used more Halle Thompson, but now Thompson is part of the learning curve.
There's a lot going on with Wisconsin volleyball, and Sheffield is blunt about it. Ultimately, this team's ceiling is unchanged, but the Badgers have to find a way to get up off the floor.
Add us as a preferred source on Google