Kentucky volleyball has spent the last two months making really good teams look completely overmatched. On Thursday night in Kansas City, the script flipped at the worst possible time for the Cats.
Riding a 26-match winning streak into a Final Four showdown with Wisconsin, a program Kentucky has never beaten, the Cats walked into a Badger buzzsaw. The first set was a gut punch. Kentucky managed just 12 points, their lowest-scoring set of the season, while Wisconsin hit a ridiculous .682 and looked every bit like the bully in red the numbers said they were.
The second set was the first time the Cats started to look like themselves. Down but not dead, Kentucky clawed out a 25–22 win behind Eva Hudson finally finding a rhythm, finishing the first three sets with 14 kills on 32 swings (.344). Even then, it never felt comfortable. Kentucky hit just .258 in that frame which was better, but still not the kind of ruthless efficiency they’ve ridden all year. Meanwhile Wisconsin’s floor never really dropped out.
Wisconsin’s size finally drags Kentucky into deep water
Set three was the cruel one. The Cats actually improved offensively, hitting .333 (16 kills, 2 errors on 42 swings), but the Badgers stayed in control of the match’s pressure points. Wisconsin closed the set on a 3–0 run to win 25–21, backed by star outside Mimi Colyer already sitting on 22 kills on 43 swings (.395) and middle Carter Booth playing video-game volleyball with 14 kills on 19 swings (.632) and three total blocks through three sets.
That’s the story of the night through three: Kentucky is good. Wisconsin has been almost perfect. The Badgers are hitting .390 overall (49–10–100), while the Cats are grinding at .220 (38–14–109). For a Kentucky team that’s lived in the efficiency margins all season, that’s a brutal math problem to solve on the fly.
Early in the fourth set, you could feel both the urgency and the weight of the moment. Kentucky jumped out to a 4–2 lead, exactly the kind of start they needed to breathe a little and let the crowd back in. But they couldn’t build the cushion. Wisconsin punched right back with four straight points to go up 6–4, and suddenly every rally felt like a mini match point.
Craig Skinner kept searching for the right lineup to both hold up in serve receive and slow down Wisconsin’s pin hitters. Brooklyn DeLeye and Hudson kept taking big swings. Lizzie Carr tried to bang away in the middle. Kassie O’Brien did everything she could to steady the offense, already sitting on 32 assists through three sets. But when your opponent is siding out at an elite clip and living over the top of your block, there’s only so much scheming you can do.
Wisconsin tied their season high with 10 blocks midway through the 4th set, that is an insane stat.
Kentucky finally looked like the team that had bulldozed its way through the bracket when it became the first side to 15 in the fourth. You could feel the desperation in every swing. Every rally ending with a scream, a fist pump, or a huddle that lasted half a beat longer than usual. Both benches were on their feet. This didn’t feel like just another set; it felt like a season hanging by a thread.
Even then, the one thing that never really came was Kentucky’s trademark transition game. All night long, the Cats had struggled to turn digs into clean swings, and Craig Skinner kept hammering the same message in huddles: urgency and joy. The urgency was there. The joy was trying to claw its way through the nerves.
Kentucky nudged in front 18–16, seven points away from forcing a fifth set, but Wisconsin just would not break. Every time the Cats tried to stretch it to three or four, the Badgers leaned on the same formula: serve tough, pass well, and let their stars go to work. By this point, Carter Booth was working on a career high in kills, and it felt like every time Wisconsin needed a side-out, she was waiting on a perfect set in the middle.
When Kentucky pushed it to 20–17, it felt like the breakthrough. Then a net violation kept Wisconsin’s rally alive. Eva Hudson responded with a gorgeous touch shot to push the Cats four points from a fifth, only for another net violation, this time on Lizzie Carr, to keep the door cracked open.
Hudson kept trying to slam it shut. Her eighth kill of the set sent her back to the service line, but Booth answered again from the middle to make it 22–21, one more hammer in a night where she was almost unstoppable. On the pin, Mimi Colyer had already tied her career high in kills, and you could feel Kentucky constantly caught between loading up to stop her on and bracing for another Booth quick in the middle.
Then came the sequence that had every Kentucky fan screaming at their TV. Brooklyn DeLeye crushed one off the block to bring up Molly Tuozzo, Kentucky’s best server, needing just two points to force a fifth. Hudson, from the back row, gave Kentucky three set points. Booth answered again to cut it to two, and Kentucky still held a set point if it could just find a clean side-out.
Instead, chaos. On the next rally, Wisconsin crossed under the net and Asia Thigpen rolled her ankle on the landing. No review. No challenge. The officials waved it off as an unreviewable play, and suddenly the Badgers were right back in it.
Skinner’s response in the huddle was simple: “Rip it.” DeLeye did exactly that on the next swing — and sent it just long. Now Wisconsin was two points from the national title game, the entire match teetering on a knife’s edge.
Colyer tried to finish it from the back row, but this time Kentucky’s block held. A massive stuff at the net gave the Cats their fourth set point, and finally, Kennedy Washington delivered the moment they’d been clawing toward all night. Her kill sealed a 26–24 win in the fourth and dragged this heavyweight fight into a deciding fifth set with everything on the line.
Remember in the fifth set it is the first team to 15 points.
Kentucky came into the fifth set with history on its side. The Cats were 4–1 in five-set matches this season. Wisconsin had only been pushed to five once and the Badgers won that one, too. Somebody’s pattern was going to break.
Wisconsin struck first to go up 1–0, but Kentucky punched right back with four straight points, capped by an ace and a monster stuff from Lizzie Carr that forced Kelly Sheffield into an early timeout. During the break, he kept pleading with his team to hit over Kentucky’s block and be more efficient.
The message didn’t land right away. Out of the timeout, Kentucky stacked two more points on top of the run to make it 6–1 before a service error finally handed the ball back. Even then, the Cats kept landing blows, but Wisconsin refused to fall over. That middle attack especially Carter Booth, who finished with a career-high 21 kills on .633 hitting, just kept showing up at the worst possible times.
Kentucky led 9–6 before a 4–1 Wisconsin push tightened things back up and turned the set into pure survival mode. The Cats were five points from a national title game, but suddenly every mistake felt like it might end the season.
An unforced error on a bad set gave Wisconsin the ball. Another error from Brooklyn DeLeye cut the lead to 11–9, and it felt like Kentucky was trying to give the momentum away. To her credit, DeLeye walked right through it. On the very next chance, she hammered one straight down the middle to push the Cats back in front and settle everybody down.
From there, it turned into star vs. star. DeLeye’s swing put Kentucky on the doorstep. Eva Hudson, who had carried the offense all night, found a touch off the block to give Kentucky its first match point, and the Kentucky section in Kansas City absolutely lost it.
Of course, nothing about this night was going to be easy. Mimi Colyer, who finished with a staggering 32 kills, wiped out match point No. 1. Kentucky earned another at 14–12, and Colyer erased that one, too. After a timeout, with the season hanging by a thread for a third time, Craig Skinner kept the message simple: communicate and compete.
That’s exactly what they did. Kentucky’s block slowed Wisconsin just enough, the defense popped one more ball in the air, and Hudson did what National Player of the Year candidates do crushed it off the block and down to end it, 15–13 in the fifth, 3–2 Cats.
The final box score tells you how high the level was. Wisconsin hit .375 as a team behind Booth and Colyer. Kentucky countered with 65 kills, hitting .254, led by Hudson’s 29 kills on .455, DeLeye’s 15, and 8 more from Thigpen. Kassie O’Brien piled up 54 assists, and Carr’s eight kills and timely blocks were the backbone of a front line that finally found its edge when it absolutely had to.
From a season-low 12 points in the opening set to clawing back and winning a fifth set with everything on the line, this was one of the wildest swings of the Craig Skinner era, one of the worst starts, and one of the best endings.
Now Kentucky’s reward is exactly what this group has been playing for all year: an all-SEC national title showdown with Texas A&M, and a chance to hang another banner Sunday at 3 PM.