For years, Mary Wise has heard the same question repeatedly.
“When will the Southeastern Conference get better?”
Florida’s volleyball coach has remained consistent in her answer.
“You better be careful what you wish for.”
The questions were deservedly asked. After all, in Wise’s 20 years coaching at UF coming into this season, the Gators were not challenged by conference foes, with Florida a combined 306-12 in SEC play.
But after this past weekend, the coaching veteran is being asked a different slate of questions.
“I’ve gotten the email that says, ‘What’s wrong with Florida volleyball? We lost two matches,’” Wise said. “Well, folks, you play top-25 teams on the road, those aren’t easy wins.”
For just the second time during her UF coaching career, Wise watched her team lose back-to-back SEC games last weekend during a road trip to No. 16 Tennessee and No. 19 Kentucky. The two losses dropped Florida (17-5, 10-3 SEC) four spots in the AVCA poll to No. 17 and likely knocked the Gators out of the race for an SEC championship.
Previously, 2009 was the only season UF did not win an SEC title with Wise at the helm.
“For our league to take that next step, we’ve got to have at least one team go deep into the tournament,” Wise said. “That hasn’t been the case in recent years. I think both Kentucky and Tennessee have an opportunity to go very deep.”
With the exception of discussing continued deficiencies in transition defense by back-row players, Wise had difficulty putting a finger on exactly what went wrong during the weekend.
Outside hitters Kristy Jaeckel and Stephanie Ferrell were somewhat high-error players in Friday and Sunday’s games, respectively. However, they were each forced to take more than 40 swings in both games, an inordinately high number for the duo.
Wise initially pointed out Kelly Murphy and Tangerine Wiggs as players who didn’t have good games against Tennessee but retracted that statement after reevaluating the game.
“You can look at their numbers and say they’re not playing well, but I think that would be short-sighting the quality competition we played against,” she said.
Since 1991, the SEC has been a league dominated by one team, with Florida the only program to make it to a national championship game (a 3-1 loss to Southern California in 2003). But now the Gators are stuck hunting teams like Tennessee, which Wise predicts will be the favorite to win the conference again next year.
“What we’re going to do is we’re going to spend time on the Gators,” she said.
“We talked to the team about where we can see improvement. There’s some things you can’t control. Our middles aren’t going to get any taller, but there are balls we’re not taking care of on the first contact.”
After dropping back-to-back matches on the road to Kentucky and Tennessee, Florida coach Mary Wise said the level of competition in the Southeastern Conference is starting to catch up to the Gators.
