Postmatch Quotes vs. Penn State 
Oct. 28, 2016
UW Field House - Madison, Wis. 

Head Coach Kelley Sheffield: 
Opening Statements:
"You see a lot of energy from these guys because this is the one team they haven't beaten in this conference. It's a good win. Certainly, not anything we're surprised by. You look at the stats and 20 more digs and I think that says an awful lot about the match right there. I felt our players battled like crazy.
"The back row, I loved our grit back there. They were putting an awful lot of pressure on Molly (Haggerty) on serve receive, I think she got like 85 percent of the balls, and I thought she kept us in system all night. I thought Lauren (Carlini) did a really, really good job of running the offense. You hit .667 in the first set and you certainly don't expect to maintain that. Twenty kills, no errors and 30 attempts, that's pretty filthy, but even when we came back down to earth, I just thought we did a great job of bouncing back after errors and you have your setter getting 17 digs and your libero getting 22, that's some good stuff."

On Lauryn Gillis' return to the court after her previous injury:
"Gilly was great. That's what we saw before her injury. I know she's been a little bit frustrated with coming back. She was out and as soon as she was cleared to go, we threw her out there into the wolves that is the Big Ten. There can be some hard lessons when you're not in the gym every single day for an extended period of time, and that's what you run against.
"She had a little bit of a tough time coming back with the timing and confidence of going up there, hitting with range and that's what we saw. That's what we saw last spring. That's what we saw preseason, and that's what we saw the first in the first few weeks of the year. She's a confident player that's going in there and accelerating, reaching high, hitting with range and just hitting with confidence. It was a great match for her."  

On the keys to winning the game:
"Our fight in the backcourt, just pure and simple. We served the ball pretty well, so they were having to pump a lot of balls to the outside. I would anticipate they wanted to go slide a lot more then probably what they were doing. I thought we were really doing a great job keeping them off balance with our serve, so there were a lot of two option passes, a lot of one option passes.
"I thought we were being really kind of aggressive with our serves and then just balled like crazy in the back row. We haven't really done a great job with that, to tell you the truth the past few weeks. I thought we started out defensively really well for the first part of the season and then for some reason, and that's probably on my shoulders, we kind of got away from that.

"It's a good win, but I think the first thing any of these three will tell you is there's quite a bit more we can do and we could've played better. We could've played better tonight. There's not an unexpected win and it's not a perfect match by any means. But I loved our fight and I loved our grit."

Senior Lauren Carlini
On the satisfaction of achieving the win against Penn State:
"They've beat us in some big matches during our career here, and so it's good to just be able to kick off the second half of the Big Ten season beating them. They're a great team, as they've shown. They're at the top of their rankings and it's good to finally get that ghost off of our shoulder now. We've beat everyone in the conference now, and now we can just take a deep breath and start rolling into the second half. It was a great win."

Junior Lauryn Gillis
On what the win meant to her:
"At the beginning of coming back from my injury, I kind of thought there was a group mindset to this in terms that I had to work my way back into it. I just wanted to jump back in and be my old self.

"I kind of had to step back, look at the bigger picture, and just have confidence in myself again and know that I worked up to that point, I needed to get back to that point, and I can get back to that point. And just having confidence from my teammates was a huge help. Just knowing that they believed in me and the coaches believed in me just really helped with my confidence. Tonight was a huge turning point for me, knowing that that's how I should play every night."

Senior Haleigh Nelson
On overcoming a rough third set:
"We've had a couple rough matches over the past few weeks. When we dipped in that third set and we had a chance to come back in the fourth, we welcome that challenge because we've been really trying to work on our grit and our toughness. Even though we didn't have a clean sweep with Penn State it really showed a lot of our heart that we were in it and overcome that dip because we've been really working to face challenges and be strong and confident in challenges. While maybe you can look at it and say we kind of fell off a little bit in the third set, honestly it means a lot more that we were able to take that and respond."