News About Other B1G Teams and Their Players

I just watched the WISC vs NEB match at NEB. Interesting match. Some observations.

NEB won in 3, -21, -22, 17.

It's too bad for WISC that Fuerbringer (Wisc's setter) is a freshman. She's still adjusting to the various hitters. It didn't sound like she was in WISC until August (from the announcers), which really gave her little time to adjust to the WISC hitters (unlike Izzy who's been at PSU since January).  There were a number of sets that were off a bit, making it difficult for the WISC hitters to get a good attack. That being said, she was also running all over the place as the WISC serve recieve wasn't great, some of which she was just trying to get the ball up, let alone giving the hitters a good set. But, WISC's libero playing tonight is the 3rd, that's right, 3rd string libero as the two liberos in front of her are injured. That certainly didn't help the WISC serve receive.

This reminds me of an interview with a NEB player after they beat WISC on Nov 1. She said, "We knew that WISC would go on some runs. We were trying to be mentally tough and come hand in there when that happened and then come back with runs of our own."

What kept WISC in the match was their block. WISC had 11 blocks early in the 3rd set. 11. That's ridiculous. Also, WISC had good court defense which made for some long rallies. The match almost took 2 hours, which is pretty long for a 3 set match.

There were a fair number of runs in the match. In the 3rd set, WISC was up 5-2 and NEB ran off 7 points in a row. WISC brought it back and tied NEB at 14. But then, NEB finished off the set on a 11-3 run.

WISC had 11 service errors, which is a bit high, but not too bad, as they had to serve tough against the fabulous NEB serve receive. (On a tangent, it annoys me when some announcers constantly harp on ANY service error, saying that, "against a good team you can't give them any free points". Problem with that is that if you give a good team lollypop serves, you get the ball hammered back at you. So a team has to serve tough to survive, which means that they will have a certain number of service errors.) Problem with WISC's service errors was WHEN they had them. WHen down by 3 or 4 points, you have to get the serve in. Wisc had at least 3 or 4 service errors in really bad places. You could tell that there were nerves on the WISC side as they had a number of service errors that were 3 to 6 feet long.

As Emily Ehman said on the broadcast, "NEB is just good on both sides of the ball; really good offensively and also defensively."