LEXINGTON, Ky. – Sophomore outside hitter Brooklyn DeLeye set the school record at Kentucky with the most kills in a four-set match Sunday afternoon as she recorded 30 kills on 69 swings, helping No. 13 Kentucky run its winning streak to eight in a row with a 3-1 (25-27, 25-22, 25-21, 25-21) win over the Georgia Bulldogs inside Historic Memorial Coliseum.
The record of 30 kills was shattered by DeLeye for a four-set match as she hit .377 for the afternoon with only four errors on 69 swings and also threw in eight digs to her statline. She becomes the second player all-time at Kentucky to record a 30-kill match in a match of any duration in the current rally-scoring era, as she joins Anni Thomasson (2013-16) who did it against LSU in a five-set affair. Sunday’s match was DeLeye’s 42nd-career match with 10+ kills, and it marks the 22nd time she’s reached that mark this season, as Sunday also registers as the 11th time in her career she’s had 20 or more terminations in a match, which is already second all-time at UK behind Leah Edmond’s 29.
With Sunday’s win, Kentucky improves to 17-7 on the season and sits with an 11-2 mark in Southeastern Conference play. The 11-2 mark is good enough to push Kentucky into first place by a full match over Florida, who is in second place with a 10-3 league record. Both Texas and Missouri are 9-3 with a game in hand, however UK leads those two teams by a match and a half in the win column.
Sunday marked the halfway point of Kentucky’s five-match homestand, as there are two more home matches left in 2024 with both of them coming next week in Historic Memorial Coliseum. No. 13 Kentucky will play host to Mississippi State on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. ET live on SEC Network+ and the ESPN app before wrapping up the home slate vs. Arkansas next Sunday at 4 p.m. ET.
Georgia came out strong in the opening set, snapping the Kentucky 20-sets won streak by taking the opener in a deuce set, 27-25 thanks to a .326 team hitting percentage and a 72 percent sideout conversion rate ty the Bulldogs raced out to the 1-0 lead. Kentucky was down 17-12 in the second set, but it was Asia Thigpen and a service run by Eleanor Beavin that turned the tide with Kentucky going on a 6-0 run to catapult UK level at one set all with a 25-22 second-set win.
Kentucky broke the 1-1 tie in the third set as it hit .233, but more importantly, pushed the Georgia Bulldogs to the brink offensively, holding UGA to a .139 hitting percentage for the set to take a 2-1 lead at 25-21 before closing out the match with a 25-21 fourth-set win as Kentucky closed the match winning three sets in a row to collect its eighth win on the trot.
Emma Grome paced the Kentucky offense to a team percentage of .351 with 58 assists on 66 of Kentucky’s kills for the match. Molly Tuozzo had 19 digs in the match for yet another double-figure effort out of the sophomore libero and both Grome and Beavin logged a pair of aces, with Grome’s coming back-to-back in the third set.
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