UCF Head Coach Todd Dagenais
Opening statement…
This is typical late October match. It’s going to be like this every season. Houston is a good team. We did not execute well, and they took advantage of it. I give our team credit that, even though we weren’t playing well at all, we had resilience and toughness. We got to the fourth set and did what it took to win. The mentality in the huddle was we were winning that match. We will take care of this. There was no give up or panic in our team.
On the team’s mentality in the second and third sets…
It definitely was not frustration. What people saw was competitive people being competitive. A lot of people look at that as looking composure, but we just had people who wanted to win. That was just our team being tough. That’s how they get each other up and calm each other down in the tough spots. There was confidence and the knowledge that we were going to be fine.
On players stepping up in key situations…
We can’t do it with the same regulars every night. We never know who will be there every night. Some nights you just don’t have your best stuff. When you struggle to find consistency, you have matches like this. We found the right chemistry for the night. The people that went in did the best they could and did positive things for us. All I can say is that the players went out and executed the way they needed to. Paulina came up big as a serving sub. The kills we got and when we got them tipped the match in our favor.