LSU volleyball entered Sunday’s matchup with the Alabama Crimson Tide looking to extend its current win streak to four games.
A win over Alabama (14-7, 2-5 SEC) would also stretch LSU’s (15-4, 6-2 SEC) home-game win streak to 5-0 and break a four-game losing skid against the Crimson Tide.
All-time winningest LSU coach Fran Flory was honored at the LSU football game on Saturday for her 20th season coaching the volleyball team. Flory exhibited fiery passion for her team throughout this matchup, especially in the last set when there was a disputable call made by the official, which also elevated the energy in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
“I’m going to fight for every point just like I expect my team to fight for every point,” Flory said. “I can’t really affect many points, but when I think a call is incorrect, I’m gonna fight for it and show some passion and drive that I expect out of them.”
After dropping the first set to Alabama, the Tigers strung together three consecutive set victories. LSU did not snatch the next three sets in the cleanest fashion; however, the Tigers made the necessary plays to grind out a huge conference victory for the University.
“One of the goals of the match was to stay clean,” Flory said. “Statistically, we were leading and the match shouldn’t of been as close as it was. We were giving away so many points on our errors. We were really poor. This is probably our worst serving night of the year… the nice part about that is we were able to fight through and still win.”
One of the highlights of the match for LSU was the massive boost sophomore outside hitter Milan Stokes gave the Tigers. The role player stepped up and delivered a career-high 19 kills and a .417 hitting percentage. Other key contributors for LSU was freshman setter Raigen Cianciulli with a career night of her own with 28 digs and freshman middle blocker Taylor Bannister with a game-high 21 kills.
“[Stokes] got on fire early and she created some great opportunities for us and she scored,” Flory said. “You come off the bench in a role like she has, that’s a pretty special performance by Milan.”
LSU will be back in action on Wednesday to face Ole Miss in another SEC battle. Ole Miss is currently 13-8 on the year and 4-4 in SEC play.
“We have to clean up our serving,” Flory said. “We’ve been on this trend of backing ourselves into a corner and we’re doing it to ourselves rather than the opposing team backing us in. We have to do a much better job of practicing that and holding our kids accountable of that.”
The match is set to start at 8 p.m. in the PMAC.
