Coach Mary Wise’s “down 2-0” speech isn’t magic.
Florida made its past two 2-0 deficits disappear but had nothing up its sleeves as it was swept by No. 12 Florida State (19-2, 10-1 Atlantic Coast Conference) in Tallahassee on Wednesday night (25-23, 25-22, 25-21).
No. 11 UF (17-3, 11-0 Southeastern Conference) defeated Kentucky on Oct. 7 and Texas A&M on Sunday after dropping the first two sets of each match.
Facing its highest-ranked opponent since losing to then-No. 9 Stanford on Sept. 1, Florida faced yet another daunting deficit.
Although freshman Ziva Recek led all players with 16 kills and 39 swings, the Gators could not muster enough quality passes to their other attackers to come back against the Seminoles.
Associate head coach David Boos said Florida’s high totals in kills per set, attacks per set and hitting percentage are useless without a decent passing game.
“The biggest thing for us is that we’ve got to have ball control,” he said.
“You look at the stats, and you wouldn’t think that it was that different. We outhit them percentage-wise, we outkilled them (and) outblocked them. That passing game doesn’t show up on the sheet as well as everything else does, but that was the difference in the match.”
In addition to the poor passing, digs was the one major category Florida did not lead.
Recek, the 6-foot outside hitter, had to take on a heavier defensive role as Taylor Unroe, Holly Pole and Madison Monserez combined for only 24 digs in three sets.
Recek notched 15 digs, leading the Gators in that category for the first time in her career.
Boos said Florida’s impatience led to stray hits on defense.
“We needed to be patient within the rallies,” Boos said.
“Florida State doesn’t kill a lot of balls out of system. They move the ball around here and there, but they’re not going to dominate you. They are best in system. Our job was to get them out of system, [but] we kept giving them balls in easy situations, and they exploited us.”
Florida never built up the offensive firepower it needed.
Boos said Recek’s performance was impressive given that she took 47 swings in Sunday’s come-from-behind win. But, against the Seminoles, the rest of the Gators could not get on the same page.
As a result, Florida State snapped the Florida’s 21-match winning streak in the series and beat Wise for the first time since Oct. 31, 1994.
“It was just a match that we never got our treads down,” Boos said.
“We never quite got any kind of traction going and got momentum on our side. And when we did, it was too late. It was too late.”
Ziva Recek spikes the ball over the net in Florida’s 3-0 win against Arkansas on Oct. 5, 2012, in the O’Connell Center.
