No. 1 Nebraska was staring down its first loss of the season on Friday. The Huskers fell into a 0-2 hole in front of a raucous crowd at Rec Hall with the Nittany Lions terminating north of .450.
However, the Huskers didn’t flinch, finding a way to pull off the reverse sweep including a 15-13 win in game five to keep their winning streak alive.
“I think the biggest lesson for us is that hey, we weathered a big storm,” Coach John Cook said on Tuesday. “Penn State was playing great. We found a way to hang in there and win by two points, and we talk about that all the time. You look at a lot of the matches every weekend, they’re coming down to 15-13, 16-14, 18-16 in the fifth. So sometimes you’ve got to be two points better, and that’s the message that we learned from that and it was a great job by our team of hanging in there. Their crowd is great, that place is loud and Penn State played great.”
Though there didn’t seem to be much Nebraska could do early on to slow down the Nittany Lions, Cook said the team never panicked and the players’ belief in their ability to rally never wavered. Penn State hit .163 in the last three sets.
“I just think they were playing at such a high level to start with, eventually you’re going to — it’s called regression to the mean if you took stats in college,” Cook said. “Eventually you’re going to come down more to where is your mean in playing and I just think they they were playing at a really high level. There wasn’t much we could do, they were playing so well and so they kind of came back down and we kind of took the haymaker and got back in there and found a way to start winning close games.”
The Huskers followed the comeback up with a 3-0 win at Rutgers on Sunday, though that included an 8-1 close to set two after railing for much of the game as Cook had plenty of praise for the way the Scarlet Knights played in front of another record crowd.
Merritt Beason earned her fourth Big Ten Player of the Week honor of the season by averaging 6.0 kills per set on .447 hitting while Bergen Reilly won her fourth Big Ten Setter of the Week award after averaging 11.88 assists and 3.13 digs per set. Nebraska also garnered all 64 first-place votes in the AVCA Coaches Poll for the first time.
So far this season, Nebraska is 9-5 in deuce games including the fifth set against Penn State after a 12-12 record last season. Nebraska has also won all three of its five-set matches, taking the fifth sets 15-12 against Purdue, 15-13 against Wisconsin and 15-13 against the Nittany Lions.
“One common theme in all those matches is I think we killed more balls than they have,” Cook said about Nebraska potentially wearing its opponents down in long matches. “So even though we made more errors in some of those matches, we’ve killed more balls, and when you’re killing balls, you’re scoring points and you’re not giving them an opportunity to score points. So that’s been probably the one big difference because we haven’t always won the serve and pass battle, we’ve had made more attack errors or gotten blocked more, but killing balls will give you a chance.”
Great serving will also give you a chance, and that’s what Maisie Boesiger delivered in the fifth set. Kennedi Orr had an off match, so Cook went back to Boesiger in the serving sub role in game five and she answered the call, forcing an overpass that Bekka Allick killed to give Nebraska a 12-10 lead, a point that proved to be vital in a two-point win.
“We weren’t scoring points with Kennedi, so Maisie came in and had a couple of good serves,” Cook said. “We talk about being game-changers and she she did a great job. Those were huge serves. She got them in trouble, so great job by Maisie. But again, she knows her role. She’s prepared for that, whether she sits an hour and 20 minutes, two hours, whatever. We work on that, it’s not just throw her out there.”
Nebraska performed in the clutch over the weekend to improve to 14-0 in Big Ten play, though Cook isn’t satisfied. He wants to see the Huskers pick it up on defense. Though Nebraska is still leading the country in opponent hitting percentage for the full season (narrowly ahead of No. 15 Creighton), the Huskers have allowed opponents to hit .155 in Big Ten play, second behind Wisconsin at .116.
Nebraska will look to improve that percentage this week when two bottom-half teams in attack percentage visit the Devaney Center.
“It’s week eight for us; it’s a big week,” Cook said. “The message for the team’s going to be each week the stakes get bigger, each point gets a little bit bigger and more important and the sense of urgency this time of year has got to be really strong to max out every point, and that’s what we’re working on … Excited for two very competitive matches this week, so we’re going to get a good test.”
The Huskers will host Northwestern (11-13, 5-9 Big Ten) on Wednesday night. The Huskers swept the Wildcats at Welsh-Ryan Arena back on Oct. 18 behind big performances from Merritt Beason (13 kills on .323 hitting), Harper Murray (10 kills on .412 hitting) and both middles (16 kills on .737 hitting combined from Bekka Allick and Andi Jackson).
However, Northwestern’s offensive leader, outside hitter Julia Sangiacomo, did not play in that match because of a knee injury. She’s averaging 3.92 kills per set this season on .228 hitting.
First serve is set for 7 p.m. on Nebraska Public Media. Matt Coatney will fill in for John Baylor on the radio call for those tuning into the Huskers Radio Network.
The Huskers will also host Illinois (13-11, 8-6 Big Ten) on Sunday, the first meeting this season between Cook and his former assistant, Illinois head coach Chris Tamas.
The final three weeks of the regular season will feature a different schedule — Wednesday Sunday, then Friday-Sunday, then Friday-Saturday.
“The message is we’re kind of not going to be in a routine now for the rest of the season,” Cook said. “It’s not going to be the typical Friday-Saturday. We’re playing weird days. Thanksgiving week is always a funky week, then we don’t know when we get to the tournament, we don’t know if we’re playing Thursday-Friday, Friday-Saturday. So that’s going to be one of the themes today is there’s we’re no longer in our normal routine. It’s we just we’ve got to adjust and adapt, but we’ve got to try to stay in our routine as much as we can. So they can’t change their routine because we have days off here and there and so on.”
First serve on Sunday is set for 2 p.m. and the match will again be on Nebraska Public Media.
