This was a rather unique match in that the average margin of victory per set was 9 / 4 = 2.25 points. While the tightest possible match has an exactly 2 point margin of victory for each set. I’m fairly sure that nobody keeps stats for average margin of set victory, although I suppose you could compute that stat if you had a complete database of all match results across all teams. But I’m guessing that an average 2-point margin happens almost zero times. And a 2.25 point margin happens how often - maybe one match in 10,000?
So this was about as tight of a battle as a volleyball match can be. And the victory is going to go to the team that can close out on tight sets. That would be Wisconsin in this case.
The difference was in both setting (due to injury, with consequences such as being harder to put a sufficiently accurate back-row set to Samedy) and height. You can’t argue with pure height + power, and that’s the definition of Dana Rettke. She has the power swing equivalent to all our best hitters, but she’s just hitting from a point a few inches higher. So all her hits are going downhill at a steeper angle. Plus on the block she’s that much harder to hit over.
So although Rettke didn’t single-handedly take us down, she was a big difference maker. There was a brief period where she sat out in the second set, and that’s when we really made hay and took what appeared to be an insurmountable lead. Then she came back in and I thought to myself, now we see whether Dana Rettke can almost single handedly save a lost set. She almost did, in conjunction with an incredible serving run by their libero. We were stuck at 23 for what seemed like forever, but we eventually took set 2. But in the remaining sets, we just didn’t have the superiority in those multiple deuces to close out those sets. Credit that to downhill hits by both Rettke and Molly Haggerty and Grace Loberg (along with their blocks) plus lack of kills by Samedy, and the result was one of the most exciting and competitive matches ever, but we lost.
If Miller was 100% and playing, we win that match.
Strategy-wise, I also have to complain about not enough sets to Pittman (and by the same token, probably too many sets to Hart and too many bad sets to Samedy). Pittman was a demon on fire for much of the match. She hit .647, for crying out loud, and was error-free, and you only give her 17 hits? WTF!
In contrast, Dana Rettke was given 49 hits, and yet only scored 10 more kills than Regan. Bear in mind that we only needed the reversal of 8 Badger points to win this match. That, in turn, requires only 4 more Gopher kills (that, instead in the actual game ended in Wisconsin points). Those 4 extra needed kills could have been easily gotten via about 10 more Pittman swings. This is estimated based on Pittman hitting .647 and the rest of the team hitting .243. Alternatively, only 8 more swings by Pittman and 8 less crappy sets to Samedy, would have done the job.
Do we call that an error in judgement by the setters, or do we call that a coaching error? Well in the end, the coaches are responsible for telling the setters what to do.
So I say that we sufficiently neutralized Dana Rettke such as to make the match winnable, and in spite of the huge deficit of Miller being out, the setting that was done was sufficiently good to win the match, but it’s just that the sets were improperly distributed across the available hitters according to their quality of hitting (or quality of being set in the case of Samedy).
Clearly Wisconsin was the better team on Thursday (thanks to our injury profile), but it was actually insufficient coaching that cost us the win. Mind you, I’m not saying incompetent coaching since our Hugh-led coaching staff is generally top-notch. But in this particular match we were out-coached.
