Anyone going to this volleyball match tonight?
I'll be watching on CSTV, I'm sure their "color commentators" will be horribly clumsy as usual.

While I'm not expecting (but desperately wishing for) an Aggie win, I do think it would be great for our program if we can grab a game or two off Nebraska on their home turf. Other than Minnesota (at the MN Sports Pavilion), Nebraska has swept all opponents this year, including the current #3 Stanford and #4 Penn State. In fact, with wins over PSU, Minnesota, and Ohio State, many volleyball fans are expecting the Huskers will be Big10 champs this year! :-P

If we're going to push Nebraska at all, we MUST have stellar performances from all our attackers. Nebraska puts up a huge block all the way across the net, and as outstanding as Laura is, she will not be able to carry the team on her own tonight. We also MUST have precision passing. Nebraska has gotten a lot of its points this year through serving tough. Jordan Larson has an especially nasty jumpserve -- note to Aggie passers, if Larson is serving game point and it looks close to the baseline FOR GOD'S SAKE PLAY IT BECAUSE SHE KNOWS HOW TO DROP IT RIGHT ON THE LINE. If Stanford hadn't made that mistake a couple weeks ago, maybe NU wouldn't be undefeated going into conference play.

I'd try to provide play-by-play for y'all who might be using this as your news source, but I still have a posting limit. If you go to the Women's volleyball section of http://www.volleytalk.net they will usually have fans doing pbp for the major matches.

Good luck and GIG 'EM.


[This message has been edited by wannaggie (edited 9/21/2005 8:21a).]

Nebraska takes Game 1 30-24...

Game 2: 30-21 Huskers...

Final... 30-19

Scores were about what I expected, but still a frustrating performance. That one game we were up by several points, Laura gets blocked once, and you could see the whole team just deflate. The next six passes barely reached the attack line - and the serves were not that tough. From then on, we could not get back on top mentally. In the third game, Jordan Larson basically shredded our serve receive.

What I don't understand is how we kept losing the jousts at the net! Yes, Nebraska is a bit taller and yes, John Cook always puts his team through a heavy strength-training regimen during off-season, but we were given three or four Nebraska overpasses/oversets, and there was no killer instinct in our middles to slam the ball down. Twice they just went up (too soon) to joust, had the advantage, and went too soft on the push, so Nebraska sent it right back to our floor. Getting a kill off an overpass is a tremendous momentum-booster, but we couldn't convert any of them.

Don't even get me started on the poor dink coverage.

Overall, though, I think that is about as good as we could do, on average, against a fully loaded Husker team. That is, if we played them a ten-match series, I think we'd beat them twice, they'd completely embarass us twice, and the other six match scores would look pretty similar to last night.