Buckeyes’ Volleyballers Stumble In 0-3 Loss To Rutgers….

Coming off a recent 6-match winning streak, the Buckeyes volleyballers lost their second straight match in straight sets, blanked Thursday night by Rutgers, and without much of a fight.

Columbus, OH – Ohio State volleyball coach Jen Flynn Oldenburg kept her team in the locker room for nearly 45 minutes Thursday following a 0-3 loss to Rutgers (10-5, 1-2 in Big Ten), perhaps to prove a point.

Perhaps, as if Rutgers left any points to prove.

Ohio State, coming off a recent six-match win streak, and a road split last weekend with Iowa (won) and Nebraska (lost), played like anything but a team capable of winning six in a row against a team who lost to that same Iowa team on Saturday in straight sets.

It marked the Buckeyes’ second straight blanking, having fallen to Nebraska, 0-3,  last Saturday, but this one looked and felt far different.  The Buckeyes competed against Nebraska.  Against Rutgers, they cooperated.

“I’d like to hear your opinion on the difference between the two (Nebraska and Rutgers),”  said Flynn Oldenburg as she opened her post-game press conference.  “I’m a little puzzled myself.  If I knew why we played like we did tonight we would have changed after the first set.

“I think it’s one of those thing where we’re going to face good opponents in the Big Ten, and it doesn’t matter whose name is on the front of the jersey.  It’s more about taking care of our side of things, and we didn’t do that tonight.  And when we don’t take care of our side we start to doubt, get tentative, and not play defense.  I thought the way we started the third set was much better, but we couldn’t sustain it.”

Rutgers won 25-21, 25-14, and staged a late comeback to take the final set 25-23…but in truth, it didn’t feel as close as the score might indicate.  All of the things that coaches point to that lead to losing seemed culpable to the Buckeyes fate.

And there were too many hitting errors.  Junior Naomy Govou led them with 11 kills, while senior Hannah Jones had 10.  Rutgers, by contrast, had three players finish in double figures.

Rutgers finished with 43 assists on offense.  Ohio State had 34.

The scrambled on defense.  Rutgers had twice the number of blocks, and was overall more efficient after the blocks.

The term, and not to be redundant…was confidence.  Rutgers seemed to have it as the traveling team, and Ohio State didn’t as the host team.

25-21 is not such a crushing margin to lose with in the first set as to totally destroy a team’s confidence, but within a matter of minutes Rutgers led in the second set by a margin of 14-4.

“We weren’t good enough.  We served easy and they served aggressively and didn’t allow us to get into a rhythm.  It’s something we talk about with every match.  It doesn’t matter if it’s with ten-year-olds or professionals.  Serve and passing wins games and they won that battle tonight.”

Rutgers finished the second set comfortably…too comfortably for Flynn Oldenburg’s liking as she watched the Scarlet Knights finish out the set, 25-14.

Between sets she took her team off the court, as if to further drive home the point that passive volleyball is to winning like caffeine is to a good night’s sleep.

And indeed they started better in the third, grabbing a quick lead through better serve-receive, more aggressive serving, and better defense.  But momentum, that all-important element in volleyball that opens gaps in the scoring and fuels confidence to play freely, was nowhere to be found.  At the break they Buckeyes led by just two point, 15-13.  They scored the first point out of the break to go up 16-13, but then watched as Rutgers went on 5-3 run to cut the lead to 19-18.

Ohio State again went up 23-20 on a kill by Hannah Jones, but Rutgers again answered with back-to-back points.  Trailing 23-22, Rutgers handcuffed Ohio State’s back line with a serve to tie the set at 23-23, then took the lead, 23-24.  And a moment later closed out the set and the match, 23-25.  Within a couple of minutes and a swing of five points, the Buckeyes had lost the lead and the match.

“We might have been guilty of over-thinking things,”  Flynn Oldenburg offered up, considering the final five points of the match.

“You’re going to lose a couple of points, but you’ve got to get them back on the other side of the ball.  And when things aren’t going well then we start over-thinking.  And that’s the true crime, when our brains get involved too much and we can’t turn that off.”

Naomy Govou, a junior from Lyon, France, led the Buckeyes with 11 kills for the match, and was by far the most active player at the net, and did her best to explain their issues with errors in hitting.

“We wanted to try and be as aggressive at the net as possible tonight, since passing was not good, the digs were not there, and we took too many risks in ‘spiking’,”  said Govou.  “Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.

“And we tried our best to do what we could do in the third set, but we didn’t estimate that they would come back the way they did, wanting to win the third set that hard.  That’s our fault, and maybe we needed to do the job earlier, and not let them have the chance they took at the end.  I think we learned from the six-game winning streak, and now we have to apply what we learned about closing out the match with every single game we play.  Tonight I think there was an over-thinking problem.  We wanted to win so hard, so bad, that we didn’t play free and loose.  We didn’t play our game.”

And yet…glass half full, the Buckeyes are already ahead of last year’s pace of wins (6-22).

And no doubt they’re going to carry forward something from the win streak about closing out games and matches when they play Northwestern this weekend (Saturday, 8 pm, Covelli Center).

Naomy Govou speaks English with a heavy French accent, but the translation came through loud and clear.

They didn’t play their game.