Badgers news: What questions remain one month into the season?

Four weeks ago, at the start of the Wisconsin Badgers volleyball season, we asked the team some questions for the first month of the season.

The Big Ten schedule begins tonight at 8 p.m. against Minnesota, and it seems like a good time to revisit those questions and see how they were resolved during the team's 6-3 start.

We tackled two of those questions on Tuesday, and today we'll look at two more from the preseason and a new question ahead of the Big Ten's big gauntlet.

What system will the Badgers use?

Looking back, it was probably an easy game – even though the steady hand of graduate Carly Anderson led Sarah Franklin to an otherworldly performance with 33 kills and .517 hits against Marquette last Tuesday.

Freshman Charlie Fuerbringer has led the team in a 5-1 system since the preseason game against Bradley, with the exception of the game against Marquette and one set against TCU, when the team switched to 6-2.

Fürbringer impressed with his athleticism and variety in the opening loss at Louisville, and then the two games in Milwaukee against top-five teams Texas and Stanford were something of a “welcome to the big leagues, boy” moment.

The 2022 season has shown that setting up some of the Badgers' hitters can be a challenge, as you have to raise the sets pretty darn high to get them in good hitting position. Adjusting to the college game as a freshman is hard enough, but the difficulty level is increased to the extreme when half of your hitters are out of practice due to injuries.

Fuerbringer showed in the two games against Troy and Texas A&M last weekend that she is developing a good rapport with almost all of her hitters. She helped Devyn Robinson succeed in the slide, met the challenge of Anna Smrek (putting the ball on the scoreboard) and got Julia Orzol going (4.3 kills/set, .365 hitting) in their last three games together.

Coach Kelly Sheffield talked about Fürbringer’s first weeks as a college player.

“You have to ask yourself if you can build something over time. You don't expect someone to come in and be perfect right away. You don't expect them to take responsibility, you expect them to improve.”

“You hope you have a culture and a program and everything is prepared and that they have a mindset where learning is possible, where every week is a little better than the last. And I was really impressed with their tenacity and their willingness to learn.”

“She's fun to play with. She's very stoic in her demeanor, but she has a fire burning inside her. She's just a great fighter, and in that position you need toughness, in that position you need competitiveness, and she has a lot of both.”

Can Julia Orzol return to the outside world?

The Badgers' coaching staff has always asked a lot of Julia Orzol. The latest demand is that she return to her natural position as outside hitter after a season as a back-row libero. Sure, Orzol took some reps at hitting last season, but her main focus was keeping the ball off the ground, not laying it off.

Adding to her challenges was the fact that she suffered an ankle injury at the beginning of the season, which meant she was relegated to the back row for the first week of the season.

Newcomer Trinity Shadd-Ceres did an admirable job of helping them win against top-class opponents in front of a large crowd, but there is no substitute for the experience Orzol can bring to the position.

Orzol was fit enough to return as a six-man outside rotation for the TCU game and slowly adjusted to the demands of the position again. At Texas, she hit .105 with just 1.2 kills per set and a ton of errors.

Orzol is obviously far from her native Poland, but sometimes you just need a little home cooking to get you going again. It seems that returning to the UW Field House was exactly what Orzol needed.

To use the title of one of those YouTube highlight videos, Orzol was successful against Milwaukee on Tuesday the 10th. She had 14 kills on 19 shots with just 1 error and a .684 hitting percentage. Was successful.

That .684 mark was by far her best slugging percentage in a single game—her previous bests were back-to-back games against Rhode Island and Northwestern her sophomore year, where she hit .500.

“Honestly, I feel like I was just overwhelmed with joy,” Orzol said after the game against Milwaukee. “We talked about how no matter how many times you play in the Field House for the first time, the first game of the season always feels so good.”

“I just tried to absorb it and get involved with it.”

Zach Schuster

Orzol gave it her all again last weekend. Against Troy, she hit an efficient .438 with 7 kills and was then at times the focus of the offense in Saturday's game against Texas A&M. Orzol scored 15 kills and .375 shots in the 3-set match.

Orzol will be the first to admit that she's a little undersized at the Big Ten level and needs to be a little more crafty to get the ball on the floor. She showed off both that and the athleticism that has been hampered by injuries throughout her career with some big swings and plenty of nifty spikes, swipes and other necessary tricks.

“I feel like I can play more consistently and I definitely have more control,” Orzol said. “And my repertoire has gotten even broader. So it's nice to feel like I'm in full control and can repeat one shot after another. And if I see a weakness or we talk about something before the game, I can go there and repeat that shot, so to speak.”

“It's so much fun to watch,” Sarah Franklin added. “You see the other team, their heads spinning because they have so many shots, they're like, 'Well, she hit the shot.'”

To answer the original question: Yes, Julia Orzol is now back to “99%” health (as of Saturday) and she is ready to provide an effective second option on the outside. The quality of blocks in the Big Ten will be higher, so Orzol will need to continue to improve her game.

Can they win close games?

This is an extra game for the Big Ten season. There were some really bad sets against Texas during the team's 0-3 start, but the story of the games against Louisville and Stanford was the inability to close out close sets late.

The clutch kit tracker is probably becoming a bit redundant at this point, but it will probably play a role until it no longer exists. Clutch kits are defined here as kits that are within 1 point of the red zone (20+ points).

The Badgers started the season 1-9 in decisive sets before winning 2 of their last 3 games in 5th set against Baylor and 2nd set against Texas A&M on Saturday. They lost another close game in the opening set against Marquette.

Saturday's decisive win came on extra points — quite a few extra points — thanks to the fine work of Sarah Franklin. Did that require a bit of luck? No, we'll call it the deft skill of a reigning Player of the Year.

Franklin created a set point to tie the game at 28-28, then took a well-hit ball from one of the Aggies' impressive outside balls and placed it with surgical precision into the back left corner. A perfect overpass kill.

On the set point serve, she directed the ball toward the top of the hoop, where it bounced several times and then hit the ground right next to the outstretched arm of one of the A&M players.

Franklin talked about her two unconventional points that won the set.

“I loved it and just laid on the floor and prayed. I was just thinking, please be in, please be in. When the serve hit my hand, I thought, oh, this is going to be close. And then I saw it hit the tape and I thought, ah, this is a miss. And then it kind of went over and I thought, yay.”

In any sport, breaking out of a slump can be difficult. Just look at the strange, superstitious things baseball players do when they're stuck in a prolonged slump.

The Badgers have a hard time winning close sets the traditional way, so if it takes an overpass kill and a double-doink serve to win in the extra points, so be it. And who knows, maybe we'll look back on this moment as the decisive set that turned the team's fortunes around.

“We didn't make two mistakes in a row,” said coach Sheffield matter-of-factly. “And if you don't make two in a row, you have a chance to win. And so we came right back after a mistake, made a good play and kept extending the set.”

“We just stayed together and somehow got through it. And that's something we didn't do earlier in the season against good teams, but we did it tonight. And when you're patient, you stay together, you don't panic and you just play cleaner volleyball.”

Franklin said, “I think the end of the sets is where a lot of us thrive. Then we can just play volleyball. That's our favorite part. Because you know, it's just there. It can go either way.”