#1 Nebraska Volleyball Fights Past a Tough Illinois Team

Nebraska 3 Illinois 1 - 25-14, 25-14, 24-26, 25-22

Just like Wednesday nights match, Nebraska played a team that gave us everything they had. Illinois came alive in the 3rd set to take Nebraska to four, but the Huskers closed it out in the 4th set.

Nebraska rolled past the Fighting Illini in the first two sets and was looking like a well oiled machine. Everyone was expecting a sweep after watching these sets be played.

Illinois took over in the third set and OH Raina Terry led them to a third set win. It seemed like the whole Illinois team just woke up and started playing during these sets. This made Nebraska lose all their momentum and have to rethink their game plan on their feet.

Eventually, Nebraska started to gain their energy back and helped close out the match in the 4th set which was yet another close match. The Huskers should look to improve on closing out games and keeping their energy up this week in practice.

We have known this entire season that Laney Choboy will never let a ball fall no matter what person she runs into, or in this case, the stands. She is a special kind of player and continues to show us how good she is every single match.

We saw different player, other than Harper Murray and Merritt Beason, on top of the stat line today. Bekka Allick led the team 12 kills and hitting .474 on the afternoon. She also had 5 blocks in the match as well.

You could say Merritt Beason had an off day because of what she’s been doing recently, but she still had 11 kills, hitting .121 along with 8 digs and 1 block. She really helped on defense today even though she didn’t have as many kills as usual.

Andi Jackson stats look impressive as well with 9 kills and hitting .800. She rarely has a lot of errors when she gets the chance to kill the ball and this leads to her having a great kill percentage.

Defensively, Lexi Rodriguez and Laney Choboy had a combined 25 digs out of the 52 total digs on the day for the team. These two continue to show why Nebraska’s defense is one of the top ones in the nation.

Nebraska ended the match hitting .237 while Illinois hit .109. Even though the Huskers had 52 kills, I would like to see their errors number of 22 go down heading into their last matches of the season and into post season.

Well the B1G is Nebraska’s to lose right now with #15 Penn State beating #2 Wisconsin last night. Even though the Huskers have some wiggle room now, they can’t look at anything any different after this and still need to win out.

The Huskers will remain at home for their next match this Friday, November 17th against Michigan. Another battle of the Murray sisters. This will be another great match to watch as we see the Murray family in both colors again.

The match on the 17th will begin at 8:00 pm CST at the Bob Devaney Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. This match will be on BTN/FoxSports.