On Saturday night, No. 14 Stanford (10-14, 7-11 MPSF) returned home to Maples Pavilion after its two-match run down south to face two tough competitors, California Baptist and No. 8 USC. The weekend brought a neutral impact to Stanford’s record with the Cardinal gathering a victory against the Lancers and a tough loss against the Trojans.
In the Cal Baptist match, the Cardinal went straight to work with an eye-popping 8-2 run and incredibly fast momentum until Cal Baptist called an early timeout. The break from play, however, did not stop Stanford from scoring multiple, consecutive aces and powerful kills against its opponents. The front-row players focused on spotting the holes in the Lancers’ defense and taking advantages of the Lancers’ shaky defense.
These strategies paid off, and Stanford went on to take a relatively comfortable victory (25-12, 24-26, 25-20, 25-19). Senior Daniel Tublin racked up an astounding 18 kills, with redshirt freshman Gabriel Vega right behind him with 17 kills. Freshman libero Kyle Dagostino chipped in as well with an impressive 40 assists along with 9 digs.
For the USC match, Stanford’s pre-game strategy consisted of keeping a strong attitude in order to play cohesively and smoothly throughout the match’s highs and lows.
“We had to play well to beat these guys,” Dagostino said. “They’re a really good team. We were definitely really positive, really energetic, and I know all of us were really excited to get going with the match.”
However, the method of maintaining high positivity on the prospects of the match did not last very long, with momentum slowing down after the Cardinal lost the first two sets of the match by a collective five-point margin. Early on, Stanford suffered some issues regarding communication between the defensive players in the back and getting first to the ball. The Cardinal focused more on communication and working more cooperatively to fix some of their repetitive errors going into the second set.
The second set featured some nice plays from Tublin, Vega and junior middle Conrad Kaminski. Stanford’s more developed performance strategy forced USC to revise its own defensive methods. Unfortunately, the Cardinal’s efforts did not stop the Trojans from overcoming these different techniques and closing down the third set to earn a straight-set victory in the match (23-25, 22-25, 18-25).
“I think our positivity kind of broke down a little bit,” Dagostino said. “Our positive energy definitely faltered a little bit during the second and third games. We do our best when we keep that high and we keep cheering each other on during that whole match.”
The Cardinal will not let this defeat by USC stop them from continuing their preparation for their upcoming road weekend match against No. 4 Hawaii.
“We’ve been working on pretty much everything for the last couple of weeks: fine-tuning our serving, our passing,” Dagostino said. “Those are the two main things that we’ve been working on, and our blocking and defense. I think that if we can really focus in on those and get better at those then we will be in a really good position next week for Hawaii.”
Gabriel Vega led the team with 11 kills, with junior Madison Hayden close behind at a solid 9 kills and 3 service aces. Kaminski totaled an impressive hitting percentage of .625.
Next week, the team will travel to Honolulu to play against Hawaii on Friday and Saturday at 10 p.m. The matches can be televised on Pac-12 Networks.
Contact Divine Edem at dedem ‘at’ stanford.edu.