In order to win in a stacked Pac-12 conference, a team needs to finish games strong.
The ASU women’s volleyball team played neck and neck with both No. 5 Stanford (16-3, 10-3 Pac-12) and No. 2 Cal (21-2, 11-2) all weekend, but ultimately lost both games.
The majority of sets came down to the final five points. The Sun Devils (5-16, 1-11) were just not successful when the game came down to the wire.
Cal arrived in Tempe on Friday. ASU was confident heading into the game after playing well against the Golden Bears earlier this year.
The Sun Devils needed to step up defensively to compete with Cal’s strong outside hitters and ASU found a surprising spark from redshirt freshman outside hitter Kylee Terhune.
Terhune had four block assists and held Cal All-American Tarah Murrey to only nine kills on the night.
“My goal was to shut their outsides down,” Terhune said. “I wanted really put pressure on them defensively and help us that way.”
The Sun Devils seemed composed but again had a hard time closing out sets, falling 3-0 to Cal. The Sun Devils lost all three sets by a margin of six or less.
Small errors at the end of the match proved to be the deciding factor in the end. Coach Jason Watson said ASU has to minimize those mistakes and put trust in itself to win.
“We’ve got to believe and we’ve got to take some confidence that what we’ve done to get ourselves in this position is enough to close it out,” Watson said.
It was a big match for ASU redshirt sophomore libero Caitlyn Murphy, who transferred from Cal to play as a Sun Devil.
“I’m a competitive person so I want to beat everyone, especially Cal,” Murphy said.
Cardinal prevails
Watson stressed that the team needed to believe itself in the closing points of every set.
In the opening set against Stanford, The Sun Devils did believe and beat the Cardinal 25-22.
Stanford was not its normal self in Tempe. At the end of the night they had 22 attacking errors and nine serving errors.
Sophomore outside hitter Danica Mendivil said the Sun Devils needed to capitalize on those mistakes.
“If they are giving you those free points you need to come back hard,” Mendivil said. “We stress that a lot in practices and in matches that if they are giving us that, we need to be better at being able to get more runs and score more points.”
ASU took advantage of Stanford’s errors in the first set, but the Cardinal bounced back in the next three sets.
The tall Stanford front line landed more and more blocks as the night went on, which hurt the ASU attack. The Cardinal finished with 11 total blocks at the end of the night.
Stanford also relied on a dump shot that would gently float over the ASU blockers, just out of reach of the back line.
“You’ve got to watch the hitters arm, they are going to give it away,” Watson said. “We weren’t prepared for it and it’s disappointing because we spent an enormous amount of time talking about it.”
In the end the Stanford blocks and dump shots helped the Cardinal take the last three sets and beat ASU 3-1.
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