ISU volleyball coach Christy Johnson knew before her team’s match against the Sooners what needed to be done to gain a victory: contain the Sooner hitters. Sadly, Oklahoma’s hitters led to Iowa State’s 0-3 downfall in Hilton Coliseum on Saturday night.

Four Sooners recorded double-digits in kills, and the team ended with 11 more kills total than Iowa State. Johnson said although her team did a clean job of keeping leading hitter Joanna Schmitt to a minimum, Schmitt’s teammates picked up the slack.

“They spread their offense around, and they had a lot of players get kills on us,” Johnson said. “They hit for a really high percentage, maybe the highest anyone has hit against us, even Nebraska. That tells me defensively we didn’t shut them down very well.”

Oklahoma ended with a .316 percentage, keeping Iowa State to a .198 mark.

The Sooners were dominant in the first game, holding a consistent lead that eventually stretched to an 11-point margin. Oklahoma controlled the tempo of the game and used the ferocity of Schmitt to cruise to a 30-21 win.

“I thought that we had a couple chances to go for swings, go for kills, but we gave them an easy ball instead and that was the big difference,” Johnson said.

Iowa State regrouped in the second game, and the score was tied 13 times during the course of the battle. The score went back and forth until point 29, when two consecutive Oklahoma points sent the game the Sooners way, 31-29.

“I think that we were a little slow filling holes on defense and could have picked up more,” senior Nicole Lorenzen said. “We could have been more aggressive and stuck with it and believed in ourselves. We can’t afford to not do that.”

Lorenzen’s statement was apparent in game three, when Iowa State squandered a healthy lead at the end. With the score in Iowa State’s favor at 24-17, Oklahoma slowly crept back to within one. The Sooners took the match on a serve by Oklahoma sophomore Lacy Barnes that hit the net and crawled over, landing before the 10-foot line, giving the Sooners the match, 32-30.

“It was a fluke play and it happened, but you have to take care of the game before something like that happens,” Johnson said. “If we would have taken care of business earlier then we would have won it.”

Lorenzen added the Sooners simply came out more ready to play.

“I think they were more fired up and more aggressive, and we were slow to get there,” Lorenzen said. “This was definitely a team that we wanted to beat, should beat and can beat, but we couldn’t finish at the end.”