Alabama volleyball opened its first weekend of SEC play with two teams that any Crimson Tide fan would call major rivalries. Entering into the weekend of conference play, the Tide held the No. 1 spot in the SEC West.
Friday, the Tide commenced SEC play against LSU, beating the Tigers 3-0.
The Tide’s win over LSU marked the end of an 11-match losing streak, not having won a match against the Tigers since 2006.
Head coach Ed Allen called the win one of the Tide’s best performances to date.
It was when the Tide went up against 2011 SEC champion, Tennessee, that its luck took a turn for the worst. The team posted its first loss in conference-play to the Vols 3-1.
The first set belonged to the Tide as it overpowered the Vols 25-19 with a hitting percentage of .373, starting off the match with a bang.
Until then, the Tide had not won a set against Tennessee since 2009.
But the Vols turned up the competition in the second set, posting a .405 hitting percentage and leading the Tide by as much as nine points. The Vols took the set 25-17.
After feeling a bit defeated, the Tide knew it had to push forward, but there seemed to be a slight disconnect after the third set. Allen had a quite simple explanation as to where the team went astray.
“I’d say somewhere between our shoulders and the top of our cranium,” Allen said.
Tennessee continued to dominate with a lead of 11 points for much of the third set and eventually overtook the Tide 25-15.
“We just knew that it was us,” freshman Laura Steiner said. “We weren’t putting pressure on them they were putting pressure on us.”
With a hitting percentage of .290, 13 kills and two digs against Tennessee, Steiner compared her team’s performance against the Vols versus LSU.
“I think it’s a little bit frustrating for everybody because we knew we could have played a lot better than we did, and we had so much more that we could have given and shown,” Steiner said. “I think we showed it the first game though. We were talking about today how we really had an opportunity to do good things, and we just didn’t really pound down on it.”
Setter Sierra Wilson said the team did not have same emotion against Tennessee as it did against LSU.
“We didn’t play our own game and we played according to them, and we really have to focus on our side in order to come up with wins,” Wilson, who posted 35 assists against the Vols, said.
Alabama (12-2, 1-1 SEC) hopes that Friday’s road match against Georgia will put it back on the winning track.
