Preview | Pitt volleyball prepares for Kentucky, hoping to return to fourth straight Final Four

Pitt and Kentucky, with a win in the Elite Eight, both have a chance to return to a place the two have been in the past few years. The Final Four — two wins away from a National Championship.

In Kentucky’s last time in the Final Four, the 2021 spring season, it went 2-0, beating both Washington — who beat Pitt in the Elite Eight — and Texas in four sets.

After their loss to Washington in the 2021 spring season, Pitt has gone 3-0 in the Elite Eight, earning three consecutive trips to the Final Four. But the Panthers have gone winless in the National Semifinal, losing to Nebraska twice and Louisville in 2022.

Kentucky has reached the mountaintops of the sport and Pitt is lurking, hoping to do the same with the best roster in Pitt volleyball history.

Last season, Pitt volleyball had every single player on an All-ACC roster, and the same thing held true in 2024. But what is different about this year compared to last season is Pitt’s top talent is some of the best in the Nation.

Pitt is the only team in the NCAA that has three players who are Semifinalists for AVCA National Player of the Year with sophomores opposite hitter Olivia Babcock and outside hitter Torrey Stafford and senior setter Rachel Fairbanks.

The team is loaded with talent. But Pitt hasn’t played its best to start the Tournament.

Against Oregon in the Sweet Sixteen, Pitt got exposed in serve receive, getting aced 11 times, the most the Panthers had allowed all season. The Panthers, however, were happy to get the win against a tough Oregon team even if it wasn’t up to their standards.

“Even though we weren’t playing clean Pitt volleyball, we still found a way to get the win,” sixth-year outside hitter Valeria Vazquez Gomez said.

Kentucky still saw Pitt’s deficiency against Oregon’s serve and believe it could do the same in the Elite Eight.

“We’re going to get some opportunities to score because our serve is going to put some pressure on them,” Kentucky head coach Craig Skinner said.

“We’ve been a really good serving team for most of the season,” Skinner said. “I’m sure that [Pitt is] talking about that. I think most teams that we played would give credit to our serve.”

Kentucky is No. 1 in the SEC in aces per set with 1.87. But Pitt is just as good, if not better at the service line this season with 1.99 aces per set, which is also No. 1 in the ACC.

In addition to both teams’ domination from the service line, their strategies for winning are entirely different.

“They have just a different style kind of similar to Oklahoma,” Pitt head coach Dan Fisher said. “They just stylistically are not similar to many teams we’ve played.”

Kentucky plays fast like Oklahoma, and the Wildcats also have a star First-Team All-SEC outside hitter with sophomore Brooklyn DeLeye. Oklahoma’s Alexis Shelton is a star, but DeLeye is above that—-she won SEC Player of the Year this season.

DeLeye is a high-volume hitter. On the year she has 1216 total attacks — 148 more than Babcock, who has the most swings for Pitt this season. The Topeka, Kansas native doesn’t misuse her large number of attempts, earning 509 kills and hitting .293.

The most attempts DeLeye has tallied in a single game this season is 69 against Kentucky’s four-set win over Georgia. Sixty-nine attempts is the same amount of attempts Babcock garnered against Oregon, where the Los Angeles, California native had a career-high 31 kills.

“She kind of reminds me of Kennedy Martin from Florida and that’s how I’m kind of approaching this game,” Kentucky senior defensive specialist Eleanor Beavin said of Babcock. “We’ve played against a really good opposite before that’s had 31 kills against teams.”

In Kentucky’s one match against Florida, Martin tallied 25 kills and hit .412. Despite Martin’s best efforts, the Wildcats won in Gainesville, Florida against the Gators in four sets.

The difference between Pitt and Florida is the options the Panthers have behind Babcock. Stafford — the AVCA National Player of the Year Semifinalist — has a .364 hitting percentage, the highest among all pin hitters remaining in the NCAA Tournament.

The Wildcats can’t forget about redshirt junior middle blocker Bre Kelley either. The Florida transfer has a hitting percentage of .506 and tallied 180 kills this season.

Kelley is a redshirt junior for the Panthers rather than a senior because, in 2023, her season was ended by the Wildcats when she injured her ankle while playing on the road in Lexington, Kentucky.

“It means a lot to me,” Kelley said of today’s match against Kentucky. “One because they ended my season last year.”

“But I’m just excited to play another day with these girls,” Kelley said. “It could be any team, man, I’m going to be excited, but definitely going to be very locked in for this game.”

Kentucky understands how hard it is to slow Pitt sown, especially with the combined weapons of Babcock, Stafford and Kelley.

“You just kind of hope you can slow down one of their best players and then keep their others to kind of a minimum,” Beavin said.  “Not just have one player just go off. And I think we have good chances that we can just keep a nice steady balance across the board.”

No game is easy in the Elite Eigh. Teams have to dig deep and grind it out to earn a spot in the Final Four. Pitt, however, has the advantage in the opportunity to head to a fourth straight National Semifinal in front of its own crowd.