F-R-S stands for Failure Recovery System in the Nebraska volleyball gym, and that was on full display in Friday night’s sweep over No. 14 Arizona State.
No. 5 Nebraska volleyball slowed down a fast-paced Sun Devil offense in the Nebraska Classic on Friday night to pick up its third ranked win of the season (25-20, 26-24, 25-19).
“One thing that we’ve talked a lot about as a team is just being each other’s biggest cheerleaders and being great teammates, and coming into tonight we knew that FRS, our Failure Recovery System, moving on, was going to be a key component of tonight’s match,” senior captain Merritt Beason said. “They’re a great team, they have great players, we knew they were going to score, and so for us, it was going to be how quickly can we bounce back and can we move on when they do make those plays?
“I think that’s what I’m most proud of is I think throughout the entire match, if they did something good, we were like, ‘OK, they’re great players, we’re going to do something good right back.’”
Nebraska (7-1) hit .319 overall with three Huskers notching double-digit kills. Bergen Reilly led the Huskers with 40 assists and 15 digs, her sixth double-double in eight matches. The Huskers held the Sun Devils (7-1) to .213 hitting to hand them their first loss of the season as Lexi Rodriguez chipped in 10 digs and freshman Olivia Mauch added nine off the bench.
“You guys saw another great match,” Coach John Cook said. “Both teams played really, really well, low-error volleyball. It was really high-level volleyball. I’m very impressed with Arizona State, and it was a great win for the Huskers. The highlights are we didn’t get aced. They’re very good serving team, they have more aces than errors this year … The other great thing is until you play against that speed that they go, I’ve never seen a team that goes that fast, so it took us a while to adjust … That was a great job by our team of making adjustments and wearing them down and starting to slow them down.”
Beason continued her bounce-back week with her second-straight strong offensive performance, posting a match-high 15 kills on .429 hitting plus three blocks and an ace. Andi Jackson recorded double-digit kills for the second consecutive match with 10 on .389 hitting while fellow middle blocker Rebekah Allick added seven kills on .462 hitting and a match-high five blocks.
“It makes my job really easy when I have two middle blockers that kill a lot of balls, because that creates a lot of space for me,” Beason said. “So a lot of credit to those two, because their middles scheme a lot and they’re in a lot of different situations and scenarios. I just knew coming into tonight that I was going to have a lot of space, and so when I had that opportunity, I needed to capitalize on it. I think as a team, what was really good attacking-wise was we were just being creative and we knew that we were going to have to find ways to get kills, and I think that’s what we did tonight.”
Jackson picked up where she left off on Tuesday, terminating the first five balls that came her way and finishing with a set-high six kills on seven attempts. Nebraska sided out at 90% and hit .419, jumping in front early and holding on the rest of the way to secure a five-point victory.
However, the Huskers didn’t do much to stop the Sun Devils either as they hit .355 with a 72% sideout rate. Arizona State gave Nebraska five free points at the service line without an ace, helping create a comfortable cushion for the host team.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever done that before in a whole game … Really, really impressive,” Cook said of the sideout rate. “But they were also 72%. This was like men’s volleyball tonight. It was just going to come down to who can make a couple big plays, because both teams were siding out great.”
The teams continued trading blows throughout the second set. Nebraska fell behind 15-12 midway through thanks to a 4-0 Sun Devil run, but the Huskers rallied to take a 19-18 lead, triggering the first called timeout of the night by either squad. Six more ties and a pair of lead changes followed as Arizona State saved one set point, but the Huskers closed it out on their second attempt with a kill from Beason.
The senior captain took over the second set with seven kills on nine errorless swings as Nebraska hit .294. Arizona State doubled its attack errors with six in the set (including three Nebraska blocks), hitting .227. In total, the set saw 18 ties and eight lead changes.
Nebraska used a 5-0 run featuring Lindsay Krause at the service line early in set three to take a four-point advantage, but Arizona State rallied to take the lead back at 11-10 with a 5-2 spurt. Nebraska responded with three straight kills — one each from Allick, Beason and Krause — to jump back in front, and the Huskers remained in the lead the rest of the night. Nebraska won seven of the last 10 rallies to complete the sweep.
After a slow start to the match, Harper Murray finished strong with six kills in the third. Nebraska nearly doubled Arizona State in kills, 19 on .271 to 10 on .106. Arizona State’s up-tempo offense gave Nebraska’s defense problems early, but the Huskers eventually settled in and bottled up the Sun Devils more and more as the match went on.
“I think it just takes a while to figure out how to block them and how to dig them,” Cook said. “Both teams, it’s hard to play at that level we were playing at for that long of a time. You’re looking at an hour and a half of that, playing at that level. It still ended up being really high level, but I think our block and defense started taking care of some business. We got some touches and we converted.”
Nebraska has a quick turnaround as the Cornhuskers will return to the Devaney Center on Saturday afternoon to close out the Nebraska Classic against Wichita State.
The Shockers dropped their first two matches of the tournament, 3-0 to Arizona State and 3-1 to Long Beach State. Wichita State is the fourth straight Husker opponent featuring at least one Nebraska native on its roster with defensive specialist Katie Galligan (Elkhorn South) and middle blocker Haley Wolfe (Elkhorn) suiting up for the Shockers.
First serve is set for 2 p.m. CT on Big Ten Plus.
