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The Wisconsin volleyball team will travel to Michigan State on Saturday for the second leg of four straight road matches.

After beating Northwestern in four sets Wednesday, the Badgers (13-4, 3-2 Big Ten) have won it’s past three Big Ten matches to overcome an 0-2 start in conference play.

“Absolutely the team is in a better mood,” head coach Pete Waite said. “Anytime we lose matches we are not a happy group, and that is what we battle for all the time, is to get the win. You get back in the gym and you look at things a little more closely, and you ask the players to crank it up a bit, and the players have done a great job with that.”

UW has been winning games with a balanced offense, and the Badgers will look to continue that trend against the Spartans (10-5, 2-2 Big Ten). In their last match against Northwestern, no player recorded double-digit kills, but six players put away six or more.

“We had some people step up and do some nice things,” Waite said in an interview with the UWBadgers.com. “Audra Jeffers had a big night for us, and overall there’s a pretty good balance. We had seven people that finished up with anywhere from four kills to nine kills, and that means we had a good balanced attack, and we were happy about that.”

MSU started off the season hot, going 10-0 in September. The Spartans have stumbled recently, however, losing their last two to Indiana and Penn State.

The Badgers must continue their hot play if they wish to beat the Spartans in East Lansing. MSU has gone 6-0 at home for the season, their longest home winning streak since 2002.

The Spartans boast one of the top freshmen in the Big Ten in setter Natalie Emro. Emro leads the team in assists at 10.58 per set and is second on the team in blocks. Emro has also chipped in as a hitter, averaging 1.25 kills per set while hitting a .309. Besides Emro, MSU features one of the top middle blockers in the conference, junior Vanessa King. King ranks second on the team in total kills but leads the Spartan regulars in hitting at .357. If UW is to win, it must find a way to get around King’s blocking, where the junior averages 1.25 blocks per set.

Even though the Badgers have won their last three conference games, the team believes it needs to keep the intensity up to remain competitive in the Big Ten.

“Practice has remained intense this week,” setter Nikki Klingsporn said. “It is still going to keep getting more intense and more intense just because we are getting farther and farther into the season. We need to keep competing if we want to get to the top by the end of the year.”