ORLANDO – The Knights made quick work of their road trip north on Tuesday, needing just three sets to take down Jacksonville University, 3-0 to remain undefeated on the year.
"I really give Jacksonville a ton of credit for how scrappy of a defense they were," said UCF Volleyball head coach Todd Dagenais. "We were running a lot of stuff at them, but I thought their libero and their defense were outstanding."
In the end, it took UCF just one hour and 25 minutes to secure the victory and move UCF to 6-0 on the season.
If the Black and Gold struggled at all in the match, it was in the first set as UCF trailed, 7-6 before going on a strong, five-set run to take the lead. Jacksonville managed to keep it close, however, and the Dolphins forced the Knights to defend their lead late, but coach Dagenais and company held on to win the first set, 25-23.
The final two sets were much less dramatic. In the second, UCF jumped out to a 7-0 lead right out of the gates and did not slow down from there, going on to win the set, 25-9, their largest margin of victory in the 2020-21 season.
In the final set, the Knights once more were out in front early, going up 8-3 and not relinquishing the lead, going on to cap off the match with a 25-17 set victory.
The comfortable margins allowed coach Dagenais to get every eligible player into the match for the first time this season. As a result, sophomore Morghan Chambers got to make her UCF debut, getting the first kill of her collegiate career in the second set to put the Knights up, 23-6. Middle blockers Megan Lively and Brittiney Jones also made their collegiate debuts.
The Knights, who were already leading The American with 1.83 service aces per set, had the serving game firing on all cylinders in the contest as six different UCF players hit service aces, with Dresden Pass and Kathryn Wesolich each hitting for two.
Nerissa Moravec, who is coming off a weekend in which she earned her first ever conference Defensive Player of the Week award, was looking to show why she should be in consideration for the award again as she racked up a team-high six block assists in the match. Moravec was on top of her game offensively as well as she hits for five kills at a .444 hitting percentage.
DAGENAIS DIALOUGE:
[On getting everyone playing time]
"We were able to play a match where every single person got to play. First points of careers were scored, and we got to do a lot of different things in a short amount of time... It just doesn't happen very often where you can get everyone in like that. Volleyball is a game where you have a finite amount of substitutions, and so you only have so many opportunities to get people into games, so the opportunity has to present itself for you to be able to do that, and fortunately tonight, it did."
[On Moravec]
"We set her once in the first set when we probably should have set her six or seven times because she was really finding ways in between [Jacksonville's] blocks... It was in the game plan to set the middles more but we didn't do too great of a job of that in the first set because we were trying to get comfortable, but once we did settle in, we were able to diversify the offense a little bit more."
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