Alabama (10-12, 4-4 SEC) will travel to Columbia, Missouri, to face the Tigers for the second time this season. The first time the two teams played each other, the Crimson Tide came out with a 3-2 win after five back-and-forth matches in Foster Auditorium on Oct. 11.
“It’s going to be a really competitive match at Missouri,” coach Ed Allen said. “I’m sure that they’re locked in and ready to go. We beat them in a tough match here, I’m sure they’re going to be prepared to compete against us on their own stage.”
The team practiced as usual on Monday, but sophomore Emily Stebbins said the team would basically extends its fall break since the travel requires it to miss school Tuesday and Wednesday.
After splitting two matches over the weekend, it’s a quick turnaround heading to Missouri.
“It is difficult considering we played a match Friday [and Sunday], but we always know that we need to fuel ourselves well, we need to rest, and we need to take care of the academic aspect of our lives,” sophomore Leah Lawrence said. “Everyone on our team does that really well so we’re very responsible with taking care of our bodies and our academic responsibilities.”
Lawrence said playing a team again is both a good and bad. It’s useful because Alabama was able to see Missouri’s trends when the two teams played earlier in the season, but at the same time, Lawrence said the Tigers could have changed a big aspect of their game since then and that’s something Alabama will have to look out for early on in Wednesday’s match.
“You have to make sure you keep up that same mentality and execute the same game plan that we did last time,” Stebbins said. “We got the win from the last time so we just need to keep up with whatever we did last time.”
After Wednesday’s match, Alabama will take Thursday off but then it’s back to practice before it hits the road again, this time heading to Fayetteville, Arkansas for the Razorbacks.
“It’s going to be challenging for our team,” Allen said. “We turn around and play an extremely talented Arkansas teams on Sunday as well. We have two great matches ahead of us.”
Unlike Missouri, Alabama has not played Arkansas this season.
The match against Missouri (18-3, 6-2 SEC) on Wednesday will start at 7 p.m. CT. Then on Sunday, Arkansas (13-7, 3-5 SEC) and Alabama will play at 2 p.m. CT.
“It’s a little bit of a long week on the front end of it,” Allen said. “The tail end of it, they’re going to get a little bit of a break. Hopefully that’ll show in terms of their play on Sunday.”
