Women’s volleyball mixes it up with diverse offensive, defensive approach

This post was updated Nov. 3 at 11:17 p.m.

The Bruins are switching it up.

Graduate student Mac May has led UCLA women’s volleyball (17-3, 10-2 Pac-12) in kills for the past four seasons, including this year, in which the outside hitter/opposite is second in the Pac-12 with 4.72 kills per set. However, the offense is diversified with the presence of freshman outside hitter/opposite Charitie Luper and redshirt sophomore middle blocker Anna Dodson, who are second and third on the team in kills per set with 3.75 and 1.70, respectively.

Against Washington State on Friday, Dodson had multiple kills running slides – a play where a hitter runs parallel to the net before attacking in order to evade blockers.

Dodson, who finished with nine kills in the match, said she owes her success with the slide to her ability to envision the block and to graduate student setter Shelby Martin’s passing.

“Shelby did a great job of setting it off the net, and I just had a really good vision of the block,” Dodson said.

Martin said she kept feeding Dodson slides because she capitalized on those opportunities.

“(From the) first kill I could tell that she was on her game,” Martin said. “It’s super easy to find her.”

The Bruins have also added hits out of the back row to their repertoire. During her back row rotation, Luper has hit numerous “pipe” sets, which are sets for attacks from the back-middle.

“Those (pipes) have always been my favorite,” Luper said. “They’re fast, they’re quick, they’re unexpected, which is why I love them. We work on those a lot during practice.”

Against Oregon on Oct. 22, Luper had 10 kills in the first set alone, finishing with 16 kills in three sets. A week later against Washington State, the freshman set a career high in the statistic with 21 kills.

Coach Michael Sealy said running pipes for Luper helped the team target the best matchups on the court.

“We always want to utilize that (pipe),” Sealy said. “We want to make sure that we’re using the right matchups. If there’s a situation where I like Mac on a certain blocker up there, I want to use that. But, there’s going to be certain times in that set we can’t get all the way out, so we use the pipe.”

On the defensive side, one in-match adjustment the Bruins have utilized this season has been to use a blocking substitution to bring in 6-foot sophomore setter Kate Lane for the starting 5-foot-10 Martin.

Lane has appeared in four matches this season, most recently playing in all five sets in last week’s five-set contest versus Washington State in which she recorded two assists.

“Putting Kate in gives the other team a different look,” Martin said. “They have to go somewhere else where they might not connect as well, and that will give us an advantage.”