Volleyball opens home season on Sunday

The volleyball team hopes to correct its mistakes in the first home game of the season.

By Ross Taylor

Published Sept. 19, 2008

The MU volleyball team has played 10 teams in four states across three time zones this season. MU finally opens its home slate when it squares off with Baylor at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Hearnes Center.

Although the team finally doesn't have to travel for a match, that doesn't exactly mean the Tigers remain stationary.

"Right now we're kind of in a two steps forward, one step back pattern," coach Wayne Kreklow said of his team's development.

Missouri opened the season 5-5, as Kreklow constructed the non-conference schedule to test his young team early and often. Although he said he's not disappointed with the record, the Tigers' .500 record on the road trip gave him a better idea of his team's weaknesses.

"It's not one or two big, major deficiencies," Kreklow said. "It's a lot of little things in different places."

One deficiency exposed during the road trip was a lack of fast starts in sets, which has a larger importance under new NCAA scoring rules.

"With the rally scoring games to 25, that puts a premium on eliminating or minimizing unforced errors," Kreklow said. "You have to maximize chances when you get them. If you get an easy ball over, you've got to be able to capitalize on it."

Kreklow might have been speaking in generalities, but the statement could have been a direct reference to Missouri's performance in a frustrating 25-22, 22-25, 15-25, 21-25 loss to Oklahoma on Wednesday. The loss dropped Missouri to 0-1 in Big 12 play.

Before practice Thursday, both Kreklow and assistant coach Chen Feng noted Oklahoma's lack of power and size. According to the coaches, Oklahoma was content to let Missouri make its own mistakes.

And that's exactly what Missouri did.

Kreklow said he evaluates his team's serving by the ratio of service aces to service errors, which he said ideally should be 1:1 or better. Serving against Oklahoma, Missouri had two aces and 12 errors.

"It's so frustrating. We can be a great team. We've done it before. We've done it in practice, we've done it against other teams," sophomore outside hitter Julianna Klein said. "Then the next day, we come back and we're a completely different team."

Furthermore, Missouri is reevaluating its success at passing the ball. While evaluating the film of the Oklahoma loss, Kreklow charted the spot on the floor where his setters started the offense on every point.

"What I saw was a court full of dots everywhere," Kreklow said. "Whenever we got the ball where we needed it, we scored at a very high rate. But when we're outside of that area, it just goes way down."

The loss at Oklahoma adds extra importance to the match against Baylor, as Missouri can't afford to drop to 0-2 in one of the country's deepest conferences.