Oct. 9, 2004
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Volleyball is a skill game of serving, setting, passing, hitting, and blocking. Unfortunately, Iowa (9-9, 1-5) struggled to put all those skills together in their match against Wisconsin (9-5, 3-3) and lost the match in three games, (30-21, 30-24, 30-22).
“We have to have a match when we put everything together,” said Iowa Coach Cindy Fredrick. “We played better tonight than we did last night against Northwestern, but we just had too many unforced hitting errors.”
The Hawks only trailed in game one 16-19 when the Badgers went on a tear. Aubrey Meierotto served seven points for Wisconsin on their way to a 30-21 win.
In the first game, Iowa had 15 errors attacking the ball to just ten kills for a -.116. The Hawks also had three service errors.
Iowa played better in the second game, but Wisconsin slowly pulled away throughout the match. Iowa managed to come within two points, 12-14, when the Badgers started to attack. Wisconsin had 21 kills in the 30-24 game two win, compared to only eight kills by Iowa.
In the final game of the match, Iowa tied up the final game at 7-7, but that was about as close as they would come. Wisconsin controlled much of the game in the 30-22 victory. The Badgers again had 21 kills as a team, but Iowa improved from the game before to score 14 points on kills.
The final statistics tell the story of the match. Iowa had 32 kills to Wisconsin’s 53. That translates to just .043 for the match. Wisconsin, on the other hand, had a combined .370 hitting percentage. The Hawkeyes did dominate the serving category with six aces and only six serve receive errors compared to 13 ball handling mistakes by the Badgers.
Carolyn Giese had nine kills for Iowa and Laura Simpson and Stacy Vitali each added eight. Justeen Patton had 17 assists. Pam Kavadas had ten digs to pace the Hawkeyes. Lauren Bruckner and Giese had two ace serves apiece.
“Tonight we did a better job of serving and blocking, but our hitting was not as good as last night,” said Fredrick. “We did bad in all the categories tonight that we did well in last night, and that’s frustrating. We must be able to put all of the skills together.”
Iowa will host Minnesota on October 13 and Illinois on October 15. The matches will be played in Carver-Hawkeye Arena and will start at 7 p.m.