In what has become the story of the season, it was another close loss for Arizona volleyball on Thursday night. Utah defeated the Wildcats 3-1 (25-20, 21-25, 25-20, 26-24) at the Huntsman Center to take the season series.
Arizona had several players with good stat lines, but head coach Rita Stubbs was not impressed by those stats. She was more concerned about the inability to maintain the same energy throughout.
“I spend more than half of my time coaching jump hard, go hard, believe, trust,” Stubbs said. “You’re not gonna win games if you’re trying to get that done in a match.”
Those ebbs showed in the runs. Arizona kept it close for the first several points in the opening set, but Utah went on a 6-1 run to take the 11-6 lead. That five-point margin would eventually decide the set. The Wildcats fought back, trimming a six-point deficit to three at 20-17, but the early hole was too big.
“We get too relaxed,” Stubbs said. “We think everything is so easy. We’re still learning how to compete—and when it matters. That’s something that I think is very hard to coach. Only way people get better in that situation is you have options to put in, or you just sit them down.”
Sitting players down was a decision Stubbs made early. Senior middle blocker Kiari Robey was subbed out in the first set and never returned. Fellow senior Alayna Johnson played the rest of the match.
Johnson’s numbers looked good. She had six kills on .308 hitting and a team-high four blocks. She added two digs. Still, Stubbs felt she was one of the players who didn’t always “go hard.”
“AJ, you gotta work hard, you gotta jump hard, go hard,” Stubbs said about her conversations with Johnson during the match.
Both Jaelyn Hodge and Jordan Wilson surpassed the 20-kill mark. Wilson ended with a match-high 21 kills on .349 hitting. Hodge was just behind her with 20 kills on .235 hitting. Both had double-doubles with Wilson gathering 12 digs and Hodge getting 11. Wilson added two blocks (one solo) and Hodge had three.
However, both struggled at times with serve receive. The pair accounted for three of the team’s six total receiving errors. While that wasn’t the only issue the coach pointed to, the reasons for it concerned her as much as the actual errors.
“Jordan couldn’t pass because she was afraid, and then Jaelyn couldn’t pass because she was afraid,” Stubbs said. “All those isolated issues just (snowballed).”
One of the other issues in that snowball was how much the Utah block improved as the match went on. After the first two sets, Arizona led 5-1 in total blocks. When the match ended, the Utes had an 11-8 advantage.
While Stubbs has been urging freshman outside hitter Carlie Cisneros to use the block this season and to avoid the shot down the line, she felt Cisneros was going into the body of Utah’s block. It resulted in eight hitting errors against nine kills and a .030 hitting percentage.
Arizona went on a run to make the first set respectable. That carried over into the second set.
The Wildcats jumped out to a 5-1 lead. The Utes chipped away until it was 11-10 in Arizona’s favor, but the Wildcats pulled away again. They had their biggest lead at 22-16.
Like UA did in the first set, Utah kept fighting in the second set. They couldn’t overtake the visitors, but they did get things moving in the right direction for the third.
In the third set, Arizona fell behind 7-5 then used a 3-0 run to take a one-point lead. That’s when the Utes got their feet under them.
Utah went on a 6-1 run to go up 13-9. Arizona fought back to tie it at 18 points apiece, but the Utes answered with a 5-0 run to get within two points of a set win. The Wildcats scored two points to make the final score more palatable, but the Utes answered with two of their own to end it. Utah now led the match 2-1.
Arizona started the fourth set much like it started the second but couldn’t maintain control. The Wildcats raced out to a 5-1 lead. Utah responded with its own 5-1 run to tie the set.
The momentum swung back and forth until the Wildcats reached 20 points first. They just needed to maintain their two-point lead and the match would be on the way to a fifth set.
They extended that lead to three when they reached set point at 24-21. Those points were wiped away by two Utah kills and a hitting error by Hodge, but all wasn’t lost. The Wildcats were still just two points from making the match go the distance.
Arizona couldn’t stop the bleeding, though. Utah won the final five points to win the match.
The final point came on another unforced hitting error by Arizona. The Wildcats opted to go with sophomore middle blocker Journey Tucker for the kill. The sophomore had one kill on .000 hitting at that point. She launched the final one out of bounds down the middle of the court, but Stubbs wasn’t unhappy with the decision by setter Avery Scoggins.
“She was open the entire time, and I told Avery she should have been setting her,” Stubbs said.
Arizona dropped to 13-7 overall and 2-7 in Big 12 play. BYU is up next. The Cougars lost to ASU in five sets on Thursday. Stubbs hopes that the lessons learned against Utah will be put into practice in the next outing.
“We go out there and we say, ‘Okay, we were close. Why didn’t it work?’” she said. “You watch the film, you talk about it, you put them in those situations yet again.”
Lead photo by Rebecca Sasnett / Arizona Athletics