Ag volleyball team falls to Anteaters in four games
Not much else could have gone wrong for the Utah State volleyball team in its 3-1 loss to UC Irvine Thursday night in the Spectrum.
Head coach Burt Fuller said Wednesday morning the Aggies found out that their starting setter Dominique Arsenault would be out with a stress fracture in her right leg – the fourth starter out for the season.
“I won’t say we’re used to it, but we’ve dealt with it this season,” Fuller said. “It’s just one more big blow for these kids. I thought they played hard I thought they played together. We don’t have a choice. We can choose to be down or we can choose to go out and play with what we have. I think we’ve taken the latter.”
“We didn’t know who would set,” Zuzana Cernianska, playing at setter with Arsenault out said.
Cernianska said some part of the uncertainty came because the team didn’t know if it would be doing a one- or two-setter rotation.
“Zuzana did a great job coming in here after not setting for most of the season,” Fuller said. “We had to make some changes yesterday when we found out that Dominique was going to be out for a while.”
During the game, the scorekeepers had trouble with the rotation and scoring correctly, the refs had disagreements about calls, there was line-up uncertainty for both teams, balls kept bouncing onto the court during play and both coaches got upset. This caused many delays in the game.
“It was obviously really different,” junior Ingrid Roth said, “Aa you could tell with all the lineup drama in the first game. We were right, which was good because it showed that we knew what we were doing out there.”
Coming into the game, Fuller said the team was hoping to slow down the Anteaters quick offense led by All-American Kelly Wing.
“They do a real nice job of that,” Fuller said, “faster than probably anybody in the country. The balls aren’t always coming off hard, just coming off quicker. Obviously Kindy [Peterson] and Carolyn [Forbush] had never seen balls that fast before. Our goal was to slow that down.”
The Aggies managed to slow Wing down, holding the player with the third highest hitting percentage in the nation to just .048 percent. But they had more trouble with the rest of the offense.
“It doesn’t matter if you have four blockers over there,” Fuller said, “if you aren’t jumping quickly and jumping early, you aren’t going to touch that ball.”
However, Fuller did say that he was proud of the way the team played. He said that he felt they stayed close and kept up with a team that has been playing together for a really long time.
“We’re not losing by 15, or 20,” Fuller said. “I thought we stayed in it as much as we could. We’re playing against a team that’s pretty good.”
“I really am proud of our team dealing with all the adversity. Just kind of overcoming,” Roth said. “Every time we get thrown a lemon we make more lemonade. We’re at pitchers and pitchers right now, but that’s fine. We like it. We’re really resilient.”
The Aggies’ next game will be Saturday in the Spectrum against Long Beach State. Before the game the athletics department will hold a Trick or Treat night in the concourse of the Spectrum from 5-7 p.m. During the match, there will be a costume contest.
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu