Former BV West star Madison Lilley leads Kentucky Wildcats to NCAA volleyball crown

Madison Lilley will leave the University of Kentucky volleyball program with many accolades.

Here’s another one: NCAA national champion.

Lilley, a Blue Valley West High School grad, helped the second-seeded Wildcats to a 3-1 victory over No. 4 seed Texas in Omaha, Neb., for the title Saturday night in the national championship match of the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Tournament.

Lilley had a team-high 19 digs and 53 assists, plus three blocks, Saturday night against the Longhorns and was named Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA tournament.

“We weren’t taking no for an answer,” she said.

Kentucky (24-1) went 104-17 in Lilley’s four years in Lexington, with four SEC titles, four NCAA Tournament bids, an Elite Eight appearance in 2017 and the program’s first Final Four berth this year.

As John Clay of the Lexington Herald-Leader noted late last week, Lilley, the team’s star 5-foot-11 senior setter, was this season’s SEC Player of the Year and American Volleyball Coaches Association Player of the Year.

Clay wrote that Lilley was a seventh-grade camper from Kansas City whose considerable skills caught the eye of UK head coach Craig Skinner.

“She could have gone a number of places and been an All-American and done great things for so many programs,” Skinner said Friday in Clay’s column for the Herald-Leader. “For (her) to trust and see the vision we were trying to build at Kentucky was the first step. And then the second is performing and trusting the people around here.”

“This is everything that I planned to do, why I came here, why I chose Kentucky,” she told Clay on the eve of the championship match, after UK had beaten Washington in the Final Four to advance.

“I think the reason why it was the perfect fit and has been everything I wanted and more is because of the people, because of our coaching staff — Craig, Anders (Nelson), Katy Poole and our strength staff. Just the way that everyone really treats it like a family is the reason I chose to come here.

“And I knew that if the people I’m around every single day are people that I love and want to play for and want to play with, everything else will fall into place.”

UK’s championship Saturday marked the second national title of the 2020-21 school year for a Big Blue program and the 13th in the history of UK athletics.

UK’s rifle team captured its third NCAA crown last month. UK teams have now won titles in four different sports.

Mat Graf of the Herald-Leader contributed to this report.

This story was originally published April 25, 2021 at 9:57 AM.