Close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.
The Mizzou volleyball team played its first game of the Tiger Invitational on Friday afternoon against the Lipscomb Bisons.
The Tigers were looking to bounce back after suffering its first regular season loss since 2012 over the weekend at the North Texas Invitational. While they were in all four sets, they ultimately dropped three of them.
The Tigers played a hard first set against the Bisons that saw 10 ties and six lead changes. The teams went back and forth trading points until Lipscomb scored three straight points to take a 10-7 lead, and would keep the lead until the Tigers came back to take their first lead of the game at 13-12.
However, the Bisons would then go on to score five straight points, taking a 17-13 lead and forcing a timeout. The Tigers fought back to tie the score at 19, but Lipscomb scored six of the final eight points to take the first set by a score of 25-21.
The second set was a different story, as Missouri came out firing and scored 10 of the set’s first 11 points. The Tigers looked far more composed and relaxed on the floor, even laughing after a few points and confidently handling mishit balls to keep volleys alive. The Bisons came back to make it close at the end, but the Tigers managed to fend off the late rally to win the second set 25-20.
“I thought we served tougher (in the second set),” Mizzou coach Wayne Kreklow said. “With a team like that, you have to try and keep them out of an offensive flow, and I thought in that second set we served tougher, more aggressively and kept them off balance a bit. And then we just got away from that in the third and fourth sets.”
The third set mimicked the first, as the teams went back and forth before the Bisons began to pull away when the score got into the teens. Mizzou led 11-8, but watched that lead disappear quickly as Lipscomb went on an 8-0 run to take a 16-11 advantage. The Tigers fought back to make it 22-19 late, but ultimately couldn’t complete the rally as the Bisons took the third set 25-20.
“We didn’t come out in Game 3 ready to go,” Kreklow said. “We lost the match in Game 3 … We made a lot of mistakes we shouldn’t have made and let them back in. Once you let a team like that go, they’re tough to stop.”
While mentally the Tigers may have lost the match in Game 3, they ultimately lost the match in Game 4, when the Bisons fended off another late Tiger rally to win the set 25-23. After trailing the Bisons from the very beginning, the Tigers finally tied it up at 17 and, after giving up the lead once again, made the score 24-23 late. However, a serve into the net gave the Bisons their final point to secure the set and match.
“We have to be more consistent,” Kreklow said. “We have to be more aggressive and mentally tough. Lipscomb’s a tough team to play against because they run pretty fast. They’re not really big but they run their stuff … But overall I thought it was a much better outing for us (than last weekend’s games at North Texas).”
The Tigers will look to bounce back Friday night as they take on the Illinois State Redbirds in their second game of the Tiger Invitational tonight at 6:30.
“We need to try and refocus on Illinois State tonight and do the little things better,” Kreklow said. “It’s going to be a slow process for this group. This is a group that I hope will be a lot better in a month than they are now. But I think for them, the reality that this is going to be difficult is hitting them. There’s no easy fix to this. They have to stay dialed in and just keep working hard.
