By Matthew Montague
Arkansas swept the BYU women”s volleyball team 33-31, 30-26 and 30-23, Thursday night Sept. 19.
“I”m disappointed in how we competed,” head coach Karen Lamb said. “We”ve lost some matches, but this one hurts a little more.”
“I didn”t feel like we were ourselves,” she said. “We didn”t take a step forward as we have in our other matches.”
The Cougars seemed to have control of game one as they scored the first point of the match and never trailed until late in the game.
BYU was winning 27-22 but ended up losing the game 33-31.
The momentum of the match shifted when the Lady Razorbacks ended game one with an 11-4 run.
“We knew we had to fight to come back to win game one,” Arkansas senior middle blocker Sara Kincaid said. “Once we started fighting we just kept on going.”
Kincaid and senior middle blocker Libby Windell were a handful for the Cougars front line all night.
Kincaid ended the night with a team high 14 kills and a .458 attack percentage.
Windell was right behind Kincaid with 13 kills and a .478 attack percentage.
“After losing game one we gave them the confidence,” Lamb said.
The Cougars had a hard time trying to get back in the flow of the game after losing the 27-22 lead.
The Lady Razorbacks took the momentum from the comeback of game one and carried it over to game two.
They never trailed in game two and went on to win, 30-26.
“In practice this week we worked on fixing the little things like passing,” Kincaid said.
The little things ended up making a big difference in the match.
The passing and setting of senior setter Anna Velikanova helped lead Arkansas over BYU.
It wasn”t stellar play by Arkansas, but the errors of BYU gave Arkansas control of the match.
In game two BYU had nine hitting errors to the Razorbacks” three.
Arkansas also had an attack percentage of .412 to the Cougars .171.
In game three BYU started out with some strong play and had a 9-8 lead.
However, they were unable to hold on to that lead as Arkansas came back and won game three 30-23 and sealed the victory.
“I haven”t seen that team that was out there tonight,” Lamb said. “We were just a little flat tonight and I”m not sure why.”
BYU plays Illinois tonight at 7 p.m. in the Smith Fieldhouse.
