Bobcats split with South Alabama

In a battle for Sun Belt West division supremacy, both the Texas State and South Alabama volleyball teams tried to gain an advantage over the other with the regular season rapidly coming to a close.

In the end, the two game series split right down the middle with Texas State winning first game on Friday at 3-1 (25-15, 25-19, 23-25, 31-29) and South Alabama winning the second game on Saturday at 3-2 (25-21, 20-25, 25-22, 21-25, 7-15).

With both the Bobcats and the Jaguars each taking a win over the weekend, the Sun Belt West is now in a three way tie for first place between Texas State, South Alabama, and Troy who lead the division with identical 8-2 records.

For Head Volleyball Coach Sean Huiet, Saturday’s game felt like a missed opportunity for the Bobcats as a plethora of errors plagued the team throughout the game on Saturday.

“It’s frustrating in the sense that we didn’t play great,” Huiet said. “Nothing against South Alabama, that’s a great, great team…but we were just really high-aired and some of that was due to the blocking they were doing to us. But we had 35 attack errors and seven blocking errors, and I just felt like we started to let the intensity of the match overtake us. I thought if we could have calmed down there a little towards the end, maybe it’s a different outcome.”

But Saturday’s game also saw both positives and a record setting performance take place for Texas State.

Libero Jacquliene Lee has a career day for the Bobcats by completing 32 digs in the game which is the most by a player in the Huiet era and was just five digs away from tying the school record set by Sierra Smith in 2013 with 37.

Outside hitter Janell Fitzgerald had a season high in kills with 28 against South Alabama making it the third consecutive game the graduate senior had more than 25 kills in a game.

After a 25 kill performance on Friday, Fitzgerald is now 10 kills away from becoming the all time leader in kills passing Makeda Smith who set the mark from 1994-1998.

But perhaps most importantly, setter Emily DeWalt etched her name in the Sun Belt Conference history books as the all time leader in assists beating Middle Tennessee’s Leslie Clark, whose record was set from 2006-2009, with a mark of 5,693 career assists.

Despite the loss, Huiet can still take away good things the Bobcats accomplished.

“To be on the road, not playing our best and the match being in five with us having chances, we’ll take some positives out of this,” Huiet said. “A split this weekend is still good for us, because we still control a lot of our destiny.”

Texas State returns home Friday, Oct. 28 and Saturday, Oct. 29 for a showdown against rival Arkansas State with the first game starting at 6 p.m. and the second game starting at 2 p.m. all taking place at Strahan Arena.