Tonya Johnson said it all week.
She said it to her players, and she said it to everyone who asked. She said it heading into the weekend, she said it during the weekend and she certainly said it after the weekend.
“Ole Miss’s record is not indicative of the type of team they are. They are a really, really good team. They’re going to pose some problems for us.”
There are no pushovers in the SEC, but it still would’ve been understandable to think that LSU would handle Ole Miss with relative ease when they met last weekend, especially with how the Tigers were rolling, having beaten ranked Kentucky and Arkansas.
Ole Miss entered the two-game series at 4-8, having underwhelmed during its out-of-conference slate. The NCAA’s RPI system ranked them as the 120th-best team in Division I volleyball, even after its performance against LSU.
Last season, Ole Miss finished 21-9 and appeared in the NCAA Tournament, just one year after a 1-19 season. It was an incredible turnaround orchestrated by head coach Kayla Banwarth, but, for whatever reason, the momentum hadn’t carried over in the beginning of this season.
Still, the Rebels returned most of the major pieces from their talented team, and Johnson was right to regard them as a threat. In the two games Ole Miss played against the Tigers, the Rebels won once, but pushed LSU to the full five sets both times.
LSU had a hard time stopping Ole Miss’s offense, particularly 2021 All-SEC selection Sasha Ratliff and the team’s middle blockers. Johnson had a lot of praise for them.
“Their middles are unbelievable. They’re quick, and they’re fast, and they’re up all the time expecting the ball, and they put the ball away.”
Ole Miss employed Ratliff in a variety of ways, having her attack from the pins and her normal middle spot. Her unique skill set and athleticism allowed her to move all over the court with fluidity that isn’t seen from many middle blockers, and LSU was unable to stop her as she piled up 38 kills on a .492 hitting percentage.
Johnson was unhappy with the defensive play of her blockers, as they were unable to challenge Ratliff and the rest of Ole Miss’s attackers with consistency.
“We talk all the time about being low and tight over the net, our hands on their side of the net. And when we’re not like that, we get tooled. So we’ve got to be more disciplined in terms of that. We were late most of the time, we’ve got to be early on that as well.”
Offensively, though, LSU’s blockers were very good. Across the two games, senior Anita Anwusi and sophomore Alia Williams had 23 and 18 kills on hitting percentages of .450 and .405, respectively.
Williams had several highlight plays attacking from the outside, similar to Ratliff on the other side of the court, proving how effective she can be when LSU gets the ball to her. Johnson has said all year that LSU needs to get its middle blockers more involved on offense, but that has yet to happen consistently. Johnson believes the reason for those struggles has to do with LSU’s first contact, its digging.
“From an offensive standpoint, everything is dictated on what happens on the pass, on the first contact. So if that ball’s ten, twelve feet off the net, it’s really hard to get your middle involved in the offense that way. In serve receive, we’ve got to be better at putting that ball up there so that we can run our offense with all of our attackers so they’re not keying in on one specific person.”
In the Saturday match, which Ole Miss would win by a score of 3-2, LSU found themselves in holes early in sets. In the first three sets, the Tigers were quickly down by scores of 6-1, 10-4, and 7-3. Although LSU would eventually come back to tie later on in two of those sets, getting themselves into those poor positions early on made it harder to recover.
This hasn’t typically been an issue for the Tigers this year, as they’ve kept it close in the opening stages of sets, even against top-tier opponents. Johnson was unsure of the cause for the lapse against Ole Miss.
“I really don’t have an explanation for that. I’d like to think my team is ready to compete. It just makes it really, really hard, and we’re really tentative, and we’ve got to be better than that.”
However good Ole Miss may be, the Tigers struggled against a team they’d like to have beaten. With a record of 9-6, there remains work for the Tigers to make the NCAA Tournament. LSU is ranked No. 49 in RPI, eighth in the SEC. Johnson said her goal is to settle somewhere in the 30s.
“We’re gonna have to win a few more matches against ranked teams, but then we also are gonna have to take care of the matches, in terms of the matches that we absolutely can’t lose, we’re gonna have to take care of those opponents.”
That effort begins on Wednesday against 14-0 Auburn, one of only four undefeated teams in Division I. Of course, LSU would like to be the team that hands Auburn its first loss.
“They’re playing with a high level of confidence. They believe that they can beat anybody. They’re a good team, they play hard, really young, lot of freshmen. Typically, you tell freshmen, ‘Go play, go have fun, there’s no pressure,’ and that’s how they’re playing.”
After that match, the Tigers will turn to the Florida Gators, the highest-ranked team in the SEC at No. 15 in the AVCA Poll, for a two-game series in Gainesville this Saturday and Sunday.
Following a euphoric week of upsets, LSU fell back to reality in a sense with its 1-1 split against Ole Miss. With the challenges ahead of the team, it has ample opportunity to prove it can bounce back.
