If the Wisconsin volleyball team’s schedule were not already difficult enough, this weekend might just make it significantly tougher.
After splitting their matches against Michigan and Michigan State last weekend, the Badgers will play host to No. 1 Penn State and Ohio State this weekend at the Field House.
The Badgers (11-10, 6-6 Big Ten) will be challenged by the nation’s best Friday as the Lady Lions come to Madison. Over the course of the season, Penn State (24-0, 12-0) has lost only four sets in all of its matches and has not lost a match all year.
In fact, Penn State will look to extend its NCAA-record winning streak, which has now reached 88 consecutive wins. Nevertheless, while the Badgers will be huge underdogs against the Lions, they remain confident going into the weekend series.
“You have to go after them,” UW head coach Pete Waite said. “They’ve had a great season, they’re back-to-back national champions, but at any given point they’re still human. You certainly don’t just fax in the results. You go in and you go after them.”
The Badgers, winners of three of their past five games, were swept by Penn State on Oct. 3. That is something Wisconsin will try to avoid this weekend, but with the Lions’ .412 hitting percentage and 14.9 kills per set — both tops in the Big Ten — beating Penn State will be contingent on the Badgers playing a near-perfect game.
“I think we just have to be super aggressive,” outside hitter Allison Wack said. “We know that when we play our game on our side of the net we’re a much better team.
“All around we’re going to have to play great,” she continued. “We’re going to have to serve tough and get them out of their system. We’re going to have to be scrappy and really play a great game.”
Saturday, the Badgers will play host to the Ohio State Buckeyes, a team Wisconsin defeated soundly earlier in the season. That match, played in Columbus, was in the middle of a poor stretch for the Buckeyes, during which they lost four of six Big Ten games.
Now tied with Wisconsin for fifth place in the conference, however, the Buckeyes (18-7, 6-6) have won three of their past four matches and are coming off a huge sweep of then-No. 7 Minnesota.
“Obviously, we know that we’ve beaten them before, but recently they’ve won a lot of matches, so we can’t just go off knowing we beat them the first time,” libero Kim Kuzma said. “We need to come in here just as hungry and just as aggressive as the first time we played them.”
The Badgers are still the only unranked team to beat Ohio State this season. So far, the Buckeyes have only lost to No. 15 Illinois, No. 1 Penn State, No. 5 Minnesota and No. 11 Michigan in addition to Wisconsin.
But following their rough start to the Big Ten season, the Buckeyes have improved their record thanks to the play of two setters that run their offense. Senior Ashley Hughes and freshman Amanda Peterson average 9.68 and 8.9 assists per set, respectively.
“Sometimes when you play a team and they lose, they go back to the drawing board and do better things and find out better ways to improve,” Waite said. “They’re a much stronger team than when we saw them last and we expect them to really challenge us on Saturday.”
While a weekend split could be considered inevitable with the untouchable Lady Lions coming to town, the Badgers can still bask in their recent improvement, which they exhibited last week. Going into Ann Arbor having already beaten the Wolverines earlier in the year, Wisconsin stuck it to the No. 11 team in the country, showing some consistency that had not been present earlier in the conference season.
According to Kuzma, that consistency has turned into newfound confidence, and it could not have come at a better time, with Penn State next on their schedule.
“Obviously [Penn State is] a great team, but that’s why we play volleyball, to compete against the best in the nation,” she said. “But we can be a very good team if we play our game and we proved that last weekend … I think we have a chance of beating them, but we just have to be really aggressive.”
