With Thursday and Saturday matches against two top 10 teams in the country, Ball State was hoping to make a statement.
The one it made wasn’t the one it wanted.
The men’s volleyball team dropped its matches against Loyola (25-19), (25-21), (20-25), (25-17) and Lewis (25-14), (25-16), (25-18).
“We got our butts kicked pretty hard and I think the frustrating thing is we know we can play better than we did,” said Ball State head coach Joel Walton after the loss to Lewis. “We played a bad match against a good team and the result was we were done in three [sets] pretty quickly.”
Walton said playing poorly in one phase of the game led to problems across the board. Against Loyola, Ball State often struggled to return serves, a problem that reared its head against Lewis. The back row sent passes flying away from setter Graham McIlvaine, who was forced to chase.
The mistakes slowed down the Cardinal offense, making a varied offense predictable. Lewis’s block was able to quickly scramble from pin to pin, getting two or three players in front of each Ball State attacker and shutting down Walton’s offense.
Ball State hit just .172 over the two games while committing 42 attack errors.
It’s a domino-effect that led to a disappointing finish for Ball State when they walked off the court against Loyola and Lewis.
“We didn’t pass and we didn’t serve them very tough, so they were running the offense they wanted to all night,” Walton said. “We didn’t do anything to disrupt their offense and didn’t do anything to get our offense going on our side of the net — a pretty deadly combination.”
Walton said there were things to be optimistic about against Loyola, but Lewis was a different story.
Lewis hit .424 against Ball State with Greg Petty leading the way with 18 kills. The Cardinals’ offensive struggles allowed the Flyers to easily dig attacks and give setter BJ Boldog plenty of time to find options.
The end result was dozens of wide open spaces for the Lewis attackers to pin point, usually with just one blocker applying pressure.
Even Matt Leske and Kevin Owens, two of the country’s top blockers, had difficulty predicting and preventing attacks.
Walton said he’s hoping to move past the matches and focus on basics: the team’s serve reception. Struggling to return the opposing teams’ serves has been a common problem throughout the season, a main cause in many of the teams losses.
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