If sophomore outside hitter Lisa Henning was exhausted after nearly doubling her teammates’ swing numbers heading into the fourth set Saturday night, it didn’t show.
Henning broke her career kill record for a single match against Texas A&M in Missouri’s 3-1 win on Saturday. She pounded out 21 kills on 58 swings, 15 of those swings coming in the final set of the match.
“I thought Lisa did a great job for us, especially after getting off to a relatively slow start,” coach Wayne Kreklow said. “I mean, she was not a ball of fire in the first game. She was a little bit slow and made some errors, but I thought she did a really great job of composing herself and settling down. She came up with some huge plays.”
A season high 3,105 fans watched her kill number climb on the scoreboard, but Henning didn’t want any part in glancing at her stats.
“I never know how many kills I have,” Henning said. “I try to never look, because it just gets in my head.”
But her past performance is hard for her to let go, she said.
“That’s my biggest thing, I put too much (pressure) on myself,” Henning said. “I don’t want to make a mistake and when I do, I kind of get upset. But I’m starting to realize more that everybody makes mistakes and it’s ok just to move on.”
Kreklow said he has seen Henning improve in that aspect as well.
“She’s done a much better job of moving on, and it’s been big for our team,” Kreklow said. “Last year, we’d have to take her out so she should compose herself. Now, she’s still fighting it, you can see, but we can keep her in.”
He isn’t the only one who sees it, though. Senior libero Priscilla Armendariz has watched Henning’s growth even before they were teammates.
“She went to my rival high school, so we’ve known each other for a while,” Armendariz said. “We were pretty much enemies all through high school so I’ve seen her develop. As a freshman, she was a little timid and nervous, but now she’s one of the big leaders on the team.”
What started as a rivalry, though, is now an alliance both on and off the court.
“We’re really good friends, so that’s my position right there, to tell her to suck it up and forget about it,“ Armendariz said. “She listens to me a lot for a lot of things, so she takes in what I say.”
Armendariz picked up her 1,000th dig as a Tiger, becoming one of only 11 in program history to reach that mark. Henning is helping Armendariz on the back row this year, as she has transitioned from a three-rotation to a six-rotation player for the first time in her career.
Henning was a solely a middle blocker throughout high school, but now hits from almost every position on the court, a trait Kreklow is finding an advantage for the Tiger offense.
“It adds dimension to the offense,“ Kreklow said. “It forces the other team to have to find her. It’s a little different if you’ve got someone who always swings at the same spot on the net, you can load up on them at times. When you move her around like that it forces the other team to have to make adjustments and find her. So her ability to hit and play plenty of positions on the net and out of the back row is really helping us a lot.”
Fans can find Henning and the Tigers at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, when they take on Kansas State at at the Hearnes Center.
