IU looks to continue recent success

On Oct. 6, the IU volleyball team flirted with the biggest upset of the season, coming within a few points of beating then-No. 4 Nebraska.

“I think its gives us a little more confidence,” IU Coach Sherry Dunbar said. “When you play a team like that to five sets, and you feel like you probably should have won in four sets, it gives us confidence going in.”

IU (11-15, 3-11) flies west on its final road trip weekend of the season to play No. 9 Nebraska (18-5, 10-4) and conference cellar-dweller Iowa (10-17, 2-12).

In the October match, the Hoosiers had more digs, assists and kills than the Cornhuskers but could not come out with the win.

Nebraska lost three of its last four matches, dropping two last weekend to Michigan and Michigan State. This was the first time since Nebraska has been in the Big Ten that they dropped back-to-back conference games.

The Nebraska University Coliseum is one of the most hallowed courts in the country, Dunbar said.

“We need to go in and embrace the crowd,” Dunbar said. “It’s one of the neatest environments in college volleyball. I’m really excited for the kids to be able to play there and the seniors to be able to play there one last time.”

In Nebraska’s last home match, the attendance was 4,193. Comparatively, IU’s highest attended game this year was Oct. 16 against Purdue with 1,107 people in attendance.

Last year when the Hoosiers went 1-19 in the conference, their one win was against the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Earlier this year, the Hoosiers lost in four sets to Iowa.  

In the last six games, the two teams have gone in opposite directions. IU has won three of its last six matches after starting out the Big Ten season 0-8.

The Hawkeyes haven’t won a set during that stretch, being outscored 18-0 in total sets during their swoon.

Overall, Iowa is 2-27 in the last 29 conference games.

IU will not have a postseason, Dunbar said earlier this year, so these will be the last six matches for the three seniors, right-side hitter Kelci Marschall, setter Whitney Granado and middle blocker Samantha Thrower.

“We’re just trying to drill in the standards that our upperclassmen drilled into us,” Marschall said. “Doing the right thing when nobody is looking: that’s the reputation volleyball has. Things like that, that’s what we want to uphold and pass on.”

These last matches will help define the seniors’ careers, Dunbar said.

“They want to leave the program better than when they got here,” Dunbar said. “I look at the last six matches, and we’ve won three of them. Not many teams in the Big Ten can say that.”