No. 22 Tar Heels fall to Georgia Tech in Atlanta

North Carolina’s volleyball team (21-5, 12-4 ACC) fell to Georgia Tech Thursday 2-3 in the game that was the Yellow Jacket’s last chance to earn an NCAA Tournament berth.

“In a situation like this, they’re the underdogs and they have nothing to lose,” senior Emily McGee said. “Every team sees a situation like this as the only opportunity, so you see seniors come out and step up.”

UNC knew to focus on controlling Georgia Tech’s powerful seniors Monique Mead and Bailey Hunter, but the Tar Heels still couldn’t prevent them from feeding off their fans’ atmosphere.

“Monique, for (Georgia Tech), really stepped up and carried their team,” McGee said. “We definitely knew No. 5 and No. 11 were go-tos, but they were on fire.”

“It was their home court, we weren’t really able to stop them.”

The complete inability to stop the opponent is a trait that carried through the night, despite North Carolina victories in the second and fourth sets.

That failure to control the game was also evident in UNC’s offensive attack.

“Defense early was not good,” coach Joe Sagula said. “But we also only had six kills in the first set, in the third we had eight – and that’s as the whole team. That’s unheard of for us.”

“We were just not executing very well at all. We started panicking.”

The Tar Heels started this week ranked No. 22 in the nation after beating Miami and Florida State last weekend.

But the ranking might have affected the team’s approach to play.

“We probably came out too confident,” senior Cora Harms said. “We talked about how fired up they were because they were a bubble team but we still underestimated what they could do, underestimated their ability to capitalize.”

For Sagula, the team never got to the level of play that has become standard during the past two weeks.

“I thought the last four matches we played really hungry,” he said. “We were confident that we were going to go win it early.”

“Tonight when we came into the match, we came out thinking that it was going to be easy, and we were just out of it mentally, we did not know what to do.”

Sagula said that being down by as many as 10 points during the match made it hard for the players to find their bearings.

“Tonight we were way behind in the first set and didn’t know how to answer back. That set a bad tone for us.”

Sagula called the victories in the second and fourth set emotional ones, but saw the same “glazed look” from his team in the third and fifth set losses.

“We just did not come out ready to play as determined to win as we needed to be,” Sagula said.

“When we go to practice to play Clemson, we have to have a whole different mentality. We’ll have to work hard to finish strong.“

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