Seemingly still wiping the sleep out of their eyes before a noon tipoff, the earliest of the season, the Missouri volleyball team players got off to a slow start against Southeastern Conference foe Mississippi State on Sunday.
Outscored 9 to 6 through the first five points of each set, Missouri (14-5, 6-3 SEC) battled back to sweep the Bulldogs 3-0 (25-15, 25-21, 25-19) in front of 1,707 attendees at the Hearnes Center.
“We came away with the ‘W’ so we’ll always take those,” coach Wayne Kreklow said. “I was pretty pleased with how we came out and opened the match in the first game. I thought after that, we got a little bit sloppy and little lackadaisical, and I don’t think we really executed at a really high level.”
Missouri fell behind 3-4 to open the match, but sophomore hitter Emily Wilson’s second kill of the day pulled the Tigers even and helped them mount an 11-2 run to make it 14-6. The lead swelled to nine when junior hitter Lisa Henning and sophomore blocker Melissa Hartsel teamed up for a block at 23-14. Two serves later, freshman hitter Regan Peltier’s kill gave Missouri set point, which Missouri won on the next serve.
Peltier, who has until recently started and rotated out, played in every position on the court Sunday due to the absences of sophomore outside hitter Taylor Simpson and sophomore defensive specialist Niki Collier.
Simpson left the team for “personal reasons,” a statement released Saturday said, and Collier has taken a personal leave from the team. Simpson is expected to leave MU and transfer elsewhere. Collier’s return has yet to be specified.
Because of the personnel issues, Missouri, once considered the deepest team in the SEC, only had nine players active during the match.
“What happens is you’ve got to put people into positions they’re not used to playing,” Kreklow said. “So you’ve got somebody like Regan Peltier as a freshman having to play all the way around, so you put her in positions where she has to pass and defend more than she’s used to. … And any time you start doing that, it bleeds over into other areas a little bit. So other people try to do a little bit more. They overplay a little bit.”
In the second set, a Peltier kill at 9-3 and a Wilson kill at 16-10 forced Bulldog coach Jenny Hazelwood into two timeouts. Mississippi State rallied to tie the game at 19 when Kreklow took a timeout.
“’We’re on national TV,’” Wilson said Kreklow said during the stoppage, referring to the ESPNU broadcast. “‘Is this how you guys want to show yourselves on national TV?’”
After the break, Missouri took a three-point lead and took the set on a powerful kill from Henning.
Last season’s third-team All-American picked up in the third frame where she left off in the second. She notched five of her 14 kills in the final game, putting the Tigers back in the driver’s seat after an early 3-8 deficit.
“In crucial times like that, you always know Lisa is ready,” junior setter Molly Kreklow said. “In this game we wanted to try to get other people the ball and give them an opportunity to play well and get some shots at different positions, but coming into the third game, I think me and Lisa were on the same page. You give the ball to your best swing in crunch time, and Lisa’s always ready and did a great job bringing us home.”
