No. 2 Nebraska volleyball will see its third straight opponent from Texas on Tuesday as the Huskers (3-0) head to SMU to take on the Mustangs (1-1).
SMU split matches against two teams who received votes in the preseason AVCA Coaches Poll at the Wahine Volleyball Classic, dropping a five-setter to host Hawaii before rebounding to top San Diego in four.
Maya Tabron, a 6-foot-1 outside hitter, leads SMU with 3.22 kills per set on .268, 2.56 digs per set and 1.22 blocks per set. She was an honorable mention All-Pac 12 selection at Colorado a year ago. The other starting pins, left side Jamison Wheeler and opposite Naya Shime, are averaging 2.89 kills per set apiece.
Casey Batenhorst, the younger sister of former Husker Ally Batenhorst, is a back-up setter and serving specialist for the Mustangs.
Tuesday’s road trip starts another busy week for Nebraska as the Huskers will play three matches in five days for the second straight week. They’ll return home to host the Husker Invitational Thursday through Saturday, though Nebraska will only face two of the three teams who make the trip to Lincoln.
With the shift from competition days to total contests allowed during the regular season, Nebraska has gone away from the tournament format that often included playing two matches in the same day.
“When you bring in four teams and you play three matches, somebody gets the bad end of the deal, because they’ve got to play back-to-back almost,” Coach John Cook said. “I remember a couple years ago, UNO came here. The first match went five games, they played and went five games. Then they had, like, literally an hour and had to play another five-gamer. So it’s just not fair to the athletes to do that.
“What we’re doing now is we only want to play two matches, one each day. But also if you have three teams, how do you do that? So you’ve got to get a fourth team. We pay for those teams to come in, and they’re looking at who else they can play for their RPI and so on. So it’s a win-win for them. They get to come here and play at Nebraska, they get what they think are good RPI matches for them, and they get paid. So that’s kind of how we have to do it now.”
Denver, The Citadel and Montana State will participate in the tournament, though the Huskers and Pioneers will not face each other. The other two will play three matches each. Nebraska opens tournament play against The Citadel on Thursday night at 6 p.m. CT. The Huskers will take Friday off before facing Montana State on Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m.
Cook said he may have seen some fatigue impact his team against TCU on Saturday, and alluded to a possible expanded rotation to help combat that.
“We’ve just got to survive … The hard part will be we get back late, and then we’ve got to play on Thursday,” Cook said. “So it’s going to be a good mental challenge for them. But that’s why maybe I’ve got to play some more players, because we’ve got people that can play.”
Cook started the same lineup all three matches last week. Transfers Taylor Landfair and Leyla Blackwell played in three sets and one set, respectively. Cook gave the duo the whole third set against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and both of them made the most of the opportunity, showing off the team’s depth.
One way Cook has tweaked his rotation thus far is changing who Laney Choboy subs for in the back row between Harper Murray and Merritt Beason after both played all six rotations last season. Cook wants to take advantage of the talent and depth Nebraska has at defensive specialist with Olivia Mauch’s arrival (she subs for Lindsay Krause) to maximize Nebraska’s defensive and passing chops, though he wants to maintain the threat of the back-row attack from one of his pins.
“The system we kind of created is if somebody’s hot, we go with it,” Cook said. “So tonight, we started with Merritt, then we went with Harper hitting out of the back row, and she did a really nice job of managing hitting out of the back row. We’ve got it where we can have Lindsay go back there or Taylor go back there and play all the way around. So that’s kind of what we’re working on right now. But the question is, who helps us more, Liv or one of those guys in the back row? That’s the question. We always want to have one hitter back there, and we’ll just see who’s hot and can adjust this like we did tonight.”
The Huskers went 3-0 and remained No. 2 in the new AVCA Coaches Poll (and will likely move to No. 1 next week after Texas fell to No. 18 Minnesota on Monday). They also earned some weekly conference hardware as Bergen Reilly won Big Ten Setter of the Week and Rebekah Allick took Big Ten Defensive Player of the Week. Even so, Cook sees plenty of room for improvement, especially after the Huskers hit .213 in a four-set win over TCU on Saturday.
“We’ve got to get a lot better,” Cook said after the match. “We were doing some good things, but just attacking, we were making some really dumb choices. We did a great drill the day before we played Corpus Christi that I really liked, a new drill we came up with to teach them where to hit and how to hit better. And so we’ve got to continue to do that drill, just get them to understand how to get kills and how to be smart and not snap it into the block, and so we’ve got work to do. But usually in this time of year, early, you’ve got to win some ugly games, and I would say tonight, at times, it was ugly for us.”
The ACC Network will televise Tuesday’s match against SMU 7 p.m. Friday’s match against The Citadel will not be televised, though the tournament finale against Montana State will be available to local fans on Nebraska Public Media.
