What’s possible for Marquette volleyball — for good and bad — was on display in Friday night’s 3-2 loss (20-25, 25-14, 21-25, 25-19, 13-15) to Xavier (17-2, 6-1 Big East).
First, the good: sets two and four.
Across the two frames they won (25-14 and 25-19, respectively), the Golden Eagles (11-6, 5-2) hit an average of .361 and had only a combined eight attack errors to 30 kills. They seemed to bounce back from their offensive woes in the two previous frames, looking like the team that swept No. 15 Florida.
Now, the bad: sets one, three and five.
All of them, which ended in losses, were the opposite of what happened in the two victorious frames. The Golden Eagles hit an average of only .096 in the three and had 24 attack errors to 34 kills, looking more like the team Ball State beat in five.
“Our fluctuations are too big right now,” Marquette head coach Tom Mendoza said. “It’s too wide of a range for us to expect to go through a season not dropping matches like this…
“It’s one thing for that to happen in August, but in October, this is stuff we need to be getting better at.”
By the end, Natalie Ring finished with her prescribed double-digit kill-count (19) on .236 hitting, also posting 13 digs to mark her fifth double-double of the season. Hattie Bray (13) and Elena Radeff (11) were the two other Golden Eagles with more than 10 kills. Isabela Haggard earned her sixth double-double of the year (45 assists and 15 digs).
None of it mattered.
Because, at the same time, first-years Emma Parks hit .095 on 21 attacks — with only two more kills (7) than errors (5) — and Mari King hit -0.250 on 12 attacks — with five errors and only two kills — to offset the rest of the team.
“I would take hitting lower in the second and fourth if it meant just being a little bit more consistent as far as the performance we’re getting from people individually and then ourselves as a group,” Mendoza said.
With a 7-3 lead amid a 4-0 run in the opening set, the Golden Eagles started Friday in a similar vein to so many of its previous Big East matches: by getting an early advantage and forcing an early Musketeers timeout.
Then, what’s historically been Marquette’s routine ended, losing the quick advantage in an unrecoverable manner. The last time they led was 7-6, and the Musketeers used an extended 10-1 run to go ahead, 13-8, before Mendoza called his first timeout. When it led, Marquette hit .333 to Xavier’s -0.111. Ten points later, those hitting numbers essentially reversed to -0.118 and .125, respectively.
While they would finish the frame positive, the Musketeers stayed more than an arm’s length away before winning it.
In set two, Marquette got back on schedule like it had in the match’s first 10 points: by taking leads and forcing — not calling — timeouts. The Golden Eagles won the frame dominantly, 25-14, hitting a much-more efficient .440 in the process, simultaneously forcing the Musketeers back into the negatives with a much less efficient -0.088.
But, like Mendoza said, those fluctuations reared their ugly head.
Marquette played the third like its end-of-the-first-frame self again, falling 21-25 behind a lowly .065 hitting percentage. Set four? The Golden Eagles were back to their start-of-the-first-frame self again, hitting .282 en route to a 25-19 win to force a fifth in final frame.
And, following the pattern set over the previous two-plus hours, Marquette played the win-or-go-home set to 15 like it had the first and third. Thus, it lost, 15-13, despite hitting .111 to Xavier’s .000, a final point challenge only delaying — not preventing — the inevitable.
“If there was something to help solve it, we would have done it,” Mendoza said. “But, we just had too many compromised attacks or possessions where we didn’t get swings…
“It’s one thing to get blocked, but the attacks out-of-bounds is something that we really try to pride ourselves on handling a little bit cleaner. And it bit us in those three sets.”
Leading the Musketeers were Anna Taylor and Emma Grace with 10 and nine kills respectively, with Grace also digging the ball 15 times.
Now, the Golden Eagles have less than 24 hours to prepare for Saturday’s home match against Butler at 6 p.m. CST.
This article was written by Jack Albright. He can be reached at jack.albright@marquette.edu or on Twitter/X @JackAlbrightMU.