Head Coach Tonya Johnson has said all season that every game in the SEC is a battle.
She’s said it despite the NCAA’s RPI rankings suggesting that there is a big gap between the top few teams and the conference’s bottom feeders. The SEC has five teams in RPI’s current top 30, including LSU at No. 28, but also five teams lower than 60, with the bottom three being No. 94 Ole Miss, No. 123 Missouri and No. 146 Alabama.
To her credit, Johnson has most often been right, as six of LSU’s nine conference matchups have gone the distance to five sets.
After having gone 10 days without a game over fall break, LSU returned with a trip to Tuscaloosa to take on Alabama, the team in the cellar of the SEC’s standings.
Despite the ranking differential, Alabama came out swinging and seemed to have their way with LSU, who was rusty after the long break. Alabama entered the match ranked third-to-last in the SEC in blocks per set, but it finished the game with 15. The Tiger offense made it easy for Alabama, with most of their attacks coming from the left side and none of their hitters attacking with accuracy or efficiency.
After the Tigers went down 2-1 in the match following a third set where they had set point and lost it, LSU rattled off a 27-25 fourth set win to once again force a deciding fifth set.
The turnaround was engineered by a few mid-game adjustments by Johnson. She decided to move away from the normal timeshare between graduate transfer Josie Vondran and freshman Maddie Waak at setter and allow Waak to be the full-time setter for the final few sets. In addition, graduate transfer Hannah Jacobs was replaced by senior Samarah Hill at opposite hitter.
Johnson said the changes were partly due to substitution reasons, as Vondran usually plays the front row while Waak plays the back, and Jacobs is always subbed out before she reaches the back row, meaning the team was saving a few substitutions with their adjustments. However, Johnson also knew the team needed an offensive boost.
“I just thought that Hannah struggled quite a bit and I thought that [Josie] was struggling quite a bit, too. They’ll tell you, at the end of the day, that it was a good decision, I heard that from both of them. Just trying to get new energy in and see if we could change it up just a little bit to get Alabama a little out of sorts, and luckily enough, it worked.”
The changes made Alabama have to account for attacks from all angles defensively, with Dotson also moving between left and right in addition to Hill. LSU’s offense was the key as it wrapped up the fifth set with a 15-7 win and took the match, 3-2.
Although LSU prevailed, the team had to fight for it against what was supposedly a much worse opponent according to the rankings, just like the Tigers ended up having to do against lower-ranked Ole Miss. Like Johnson said, those games were battles.
If you’re keeping count, it’s Tonya Johnson 2, RPI rankings 0.
Still, as tight as the SEC is, part of LSU’s development as Johnson rebuilds the program will be learning to take care of the matches it’s supposed to win. Heading into LSU’s home matchup last Sunday against South Carolina, then No. 76 in RPI, Johnson told her team that she expected a victory.
Her team delivered in a big way, putting up a three-set sweep with set scores of 25-18, 25-13 and 25-21. LSU had a team hitting percentage of .320 while holding South Carolina to .175 on the other end.
The win was LSU’s best offensive output in a while, as the Tigers have frequently allowed opposing teams’ blockers to get comfortable. South Carolina came into the game with the 2nd-most blocks per set in the SEC, and LSU completely neutralized the Gamecocks’ net-front presence, allowing only four blocks.
Junior outside hitter Paige Flickinger came up with eight kills on a hitting percentage of .214 in the three-set win. It was her first match with a hitting percentage above .200 since Sep. 25 against Kentucky, a rough patch in which not much on offense was easy for her. During that stretch, Flickinger has been hard at work looking to bounce back.
“My approach has been consistency and working on hitting higher shots. I’ve been working a lot in practice on that deep corner ball, and I really feel like that came through for South Carolina. In practice, I’m getting in there, working on hitting the sharp line cross, working on getting all those consistent, and then just being able to make the right choice at the right time,” Flickinger said.
LSU’s ability to take care of business against middling teams will be important as it moves forward. Following this weekend’s important two-game series with Mississippi State, who is just above LSU in RPI at No. 26, the Tigers face four straight opponents ranked below them to close out the season.
As the team heads into the home stretch of the season with Selection Sunday on Nov. 27, when LSU will learn if it’ll play in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2017, the Tigers are trending to peak at the right time.
“The big thing this year has just been building confidence and us believing that we can win and that we are a great team, and I feel like a lot of that has come from the work we put in practice, summer, preseason, all of that. So I feel like now we’re kind of coming into our confidence and being able to have the attitude that we can do this, we can sweep teams, and just kind of make it our statement,” said Flickinger.
Johnson sees the same confidence, as the team has overcome a grueling early season with very little downtime.
“We weren’t able to train, we were just trying to manage, making sure our kids had the stamina to compete two days in a row against quality opponents. That was kind of the goal those first three weeks [of conference play] and over the course of the last couple weeks, we’ve been able to train, we’ve been able to break some stuff down and get better at some things,” Johnson said.
The South Carolina match may represent the turning of a new leaf for LSU, finally prepared, rested and ready to hit their stride. Johnson hopes so.
“On Sunday, we saw a totally different team, which is the team I’d like to see more often.”
