NCAA Volleyball | Missouri gives UW a scare

All night the crowd of 3,346 at Edmundson Pavilion was waiting to exhale and after an agonizing, 2 ½-hour wait, it finally arrived when Becky Perry and Alesha Deesing teamed up for an emotionally exhausting match point.

This is the kind of match Washington volleyball coach Jim McLaughlin would call big-time. The result, a tension-packed 3-2 Washington win over a stunningly resilient Missouri squad in a first-round match of the NCAA tournament, will go down as a big whew for the Huskies.

Sixth-seeded Washington (27-3), which barely avoided becoming the first seeded team in this decade to lose to an unseeded team in the first round of the tournament, advances to face Brigham Young in a second-round match today at 6 p.m. The Cougars (22-7) swept Mississippi 3-0 in Friday's early match. Today's winner moves on to the Sweet 16 and regional play at Penn State. Missouri finishes its season at 17-13.

In a night of fantastic rallies, heroic digs and thunderous exchanges of power, the Huskies hung on to win one of the most anxiety-filled evenings of volleyball in recent Edmundson memory, winning 30-23, 28-30, 30-22, 32-34, 15-11.

It was a night with 41 ties and 14 lead changes. Washington trailed in the first four games and let a three-point lead vanish in Game 5 before the Huskies, with the score tied at 11, scored the final four points to claim the white-knuckle victory.

McLaughlin said this was not an off-night for Washington but an above-average performance by a team that plays a speedy brand of offense and has a remarkably stout defense, which recorded 94 digs.

"Missouri played really well and put a lot of pressure on us defensively, just digging a ton of balls," McLaughlin said. "I thought we were good, for the most part. Our offense was good, but I thought where we struggled was our defense-to-offense transition.

"Mizzou dug 94 balls," he said. "I think that's a record against us. On the other hand, we dug 90. We played well. We just didn't convert as often as we needed to. That's what it comes down to in a championship match: Who can create the most opportunities and who can convert? We just did a little bit better, we hung in there and won the thing."

"Anything can happen in this tournament," he added. "It's just good to have this under our belt."

Christal Morrison set a postseason record for Washington with 27 kills, hitting .333 with just five errors on 66 attacks. Perry, a 6-foot-2 redshirt freshman, was equally spectacular, slamming down 21 kills on 34 swings with just four errors, a hitting percentage of .500.

Three other Huskies finished with double-digit kills: Stevie Mussie (15), Jessica Swarbrick (11) and Deesing (10). Libero Tamari Miyashiro, with 38 digs, was indispensable as the Tigers blasted, jabbed and tipped away at UW's defense with maddening effectiveness.

Morrison stressed that keeping composure was essential to pulling out such an emotionally intense win.

The Huskies were a hollering, barking bunch on the floor.

"We were fired up," Morrison said. "But our thinking was, let's really just do our stuff. We can't control them or how well or how badly they play, and they played really well tonight. It's really about our side of the net and staying focused on our side of the court."