I'd beg to differ. Western dug the ball extremely well no matter what we threw at them. The key I feel was our lack of middle attack. We seemed to pass the ball to the middle rather than to the four slot and we had a traffic jam in there. I don't think the season is over, we just won't get a very favorable seed in the tourney.

Rough loss but give credit to Western. They really dug in when we had them on the ropes several times and came up with some really big plays.

Tend to agree with Swank.

My thoughts:

1. I think the double-bye hurt us. This was Western's third match of the Tournament, and our first. We were not in sync at all during the first set.

2. Western played GREAT defense all night long. We simply could not find the floor. On several occasions we blasted the ball over the net, and their dig came back across the net and caught us by surprise.

3. We simply could not get in system. As Swank points out, we couldn't get our passes to the right spot to be able to utilize all of our hitters. The middles were a non-factor. Too much pressure on our outsides forced quite a few hitting errors.

4. Plain and simple, Western outplayed us tonight. Props to them. They deserved it. Time to re-group, re-focus, and get back to work. We can still do some damage in the NCAA tournament.

Agreed, but I'd give some credit to Western on that as well. They kept the pressure on, and we were never able to get in sync. They got into our heads. Way too many unforced errors tonight, both serving and hitting.

Important point here...if we want to have any shot at an at-large bid, we're going to have to go into Dayton and beat them.

I made the drive up for this game. It was my first Ohio volleyball game...maybe ever. My only question is related to the crowd. Was this a typical crowd in terms of size and sound?

You mean that certain components of our usual atmosphere were muzzled? Attendance for a regular season match would have been reported at 3850. :)

That's what I meant by certain components.