Ball State's men's volleyball team fell apart Tuesday night at its conference debut with the Cardinals' first loss of the season. The team dropped the game on the road to Lewis, losing the match 3-0 (30-25, 30-23, 34-32).
"This is a group that needs to keep working and figure out a way as a unit to play better," head coach Joel Walton said. "Some of it is heart, and some of it is skills."
Part of the problem was a poor blocking effort by the Cardinals (3-1, 0-1 Midwestern Intercolligate Volleyball Association). The Flyers had 10 blocks to BSU's two.
"Our blockers made a lot of the same mistakes all night long and didn't really adjust the way they needed to," Walton said. "They did a much better job of shutting us down with the blocks."
Zoran Grabovac, middle attacker, said problems with blocking stemmed from a lack of confidence.
"Every game we played a good first half of the game, and then we just let up," he said. "It was unbelievably bad volleyball."
Grabovac said the team has had problems with blocking in practice.
The Cards started the match with a .419 hitting percentage in the first game but dropped to .146 and .150 in the second and third, respectively. Lewis had a .409 hitting percentage for the entire match versus the Cards' .223.
Evan Berg led the team with 13 kills out of 26 attempts with six errors (.269), and Grabovac had 11 out of 17 attempts with three errors (.471).
" We started second guessing ourselves," Scott Bushong said. "We knew what they were going to throw at us, and we didn't respond."
The Cards held a strong lead throughout most of the third game. Lewis committed five of its 11 service errors in the game and had its lowest hitting percentage at .344. However, Lewis came back to tie the game at 29.
"I think we kind of let up at the end," Bushong said. "We kind of shot ourselves in the foot in more than one occasion."
A new defensive strategy put in use for the match failed to stop Lewis, with Jared Dayton and Jeff Soler hitting .600 and .481, respectively.
"What we were trying to do did not work," Walton said. "We need to re-evaluate and try something else."
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