Volleyball falls to Missouri

The K-State volleyball team missed another opportunity Saturday to boost its conference record, as it lost to the University of Missouri in four games. The Wildcats played a competitive two games to commence the match, but the intermission marked a turning point for the team.

Head coach Suzie Fritz said the team was lacking in basic skills.

"Our ball-handling skills were poor," Fritz said. "I didn't think we handled first contact on either side of the ball very well and didn't recover from that very well."

K-State (7-7, 2-2 in Big 12 Conference) made an effort to bring about favor for the first part of the first game but, halfway through, Missouri (10-4, 2-2) cleaned up its act and made three game-changing runs to take it 25-19. However, K-State turned the game around. In the second game, it barely held a lead for most of the game and the Tigers continually reclaimed the lead. In the end, K-State slammed it in their faces, winning 25-20. The Tigers took back the next game 25-14 after the Wildcats stumbled over a road block and dropped itself flat. Missouri continued to pummel the Wildcats in the fourth game, finding match point at 25-16. Freshman middle blocker Kaitlynn Pelger said she and her teammates felt "pretty crappy" and needed to work on fighting back during the slumps.

"At the beginning of the season, we were known as the ‘comeback team' and we have been letting down with that," Pelger said. "But we know that we're really good with that, so we need to pick up on recovering."

Individual performances were not as stellar as other matches, but there were glimmers of light. In the second and third games, the team hit over .200, but the 11 total service errors offset the front row's effort and stalled K-State. Pelger won Player of the Match after she heated up the first half of the match, but cooled some to end it, finishing with 11 kills and a .381 hitting percentage. Senior libero Lauren Mathewson powered the back row with 20 digs, and sophomore middle blocker Alex Muff added to Mathewson's defense with six block assists.

But the combined efforts were not enough, and Pelger said cohesion might have helped the effort.

"We just didn't come together as a team and didn't recover very well," she said. "That was basically it. We fought as much as we could."

The Wildcats kicked off the match on a high note; behind the service of freshman defensive specialist Tristan McCarty, K-State ran up four points to come out ahead 6-1. After losing the serve, the Wildcats began to experience difficulty sending the ball over the net, and Missouri took advantage of the temporary slump to revive its position. Senior outside hitter JuliAnne Chisholm returned fire with a black-out heater to set off three points for her team to bring the game to a 18-19, but K-State checked out after that, as Missouri went to the end with five straight to win 25-19.

The pace slowed in the second game, as both teams had trouble digging and setting up kills. K-State found some wind early on to put up three, but Missouri quickly followed suit. An unbreakable oscillation succeeded, in which each team put up big plays, but neither could latch onto any tangible momentum. A slow advancement from the home team gave it a slight lead to 11-8, but the three service errors around that time played too great of a hindrance, and K-State could not do much. After the second rotation, the Wildcats were up 19-15, but not much had happened to put them there. Freshman outside hitter Lilla Porubek changed that, though, with a nice hit at 22-20 to bring her team up to game point. Down eight and moments away from losing the game, Missouri set up a thrice-scoring connection, but Pelger swung from the opposite side with a cross-court kill to finish the game 25-20.

With 10 minutes for the teams to refocus, game three started with a 1-1 match tie. As before, the teams traded points back and forth, with the first rotation ending in a 9-all tie. Missouri took a slight lead later on, but it was nothing to write home about until it put up three in a row. Chisholm put a speedy end to the run with an attack, but the Tigers were not to be dismayed, instead scoring a run of seven points to claim game three 25-14.

With the match to lose, K-State looked to force a fifth game for one last chance to pull a win out of somewhere, but did not show a great effort in the beginning. Within the first rotation, the Wildcats scored only once per serve, while the Tigers had already put up 14 points.

Missouri continued to pummel its serves into the net, but K-State failed to capitalize on the momentum shift, ending a three-point run — its largest of game four — down seven 13-20. K-State stopped its opponent at game point for a short stretch, but Missouri still took the match 25-16.

Pelger said that, despite two rough losses, K-State was not done yet.

"We'll bounce back," she said.