The visiting Northern Iowa Panthers administered a sound beating to the Iowa State women’s volleyball team on Wednesday night — pounding the Cyclones in three quick games 15-12, 15-9 and 15-3.

Head Coach Jackie Nunez was not pleased with her team’s performance and cited communication and lack of leadership as the downfall of her team.

“The execution of a couple of our individual players and our team chemistry is just not working. Our communication on the floor was not very good. Things weren’t running well, weren’t clicking well or rolling smoothly.”

“So far this year I’ve been pretty committed to putting my six best players on the floor. I realized after tonight that I need to quit putting my six best and look for my best six,” Nunez said.

The Cyclones were ranked 30th in the preseason polls and opened with a good tournament at home on Labor Day weekend, but Nunez thinks her team has been on a holiday since.

“We have some individual players who are just playing horribly. They can’t play like that and expect to be respected,” she said. “I saw them panic tonight. We lacked maturity on the floor and leadership in terms of taking charge of execution.”

After this disappointing loss to intrastate rival UNI, Nunez is contemplating some changes for the squad.

“We’ll be looking towards some of our younger players to fill some roles until I find a combination of six that is going to work better together. We’ll be making some changes and will be re-evaluating here in a couple of days,” she said.

The three Cyclone seniors, Kirstin Hugdahl, Dana Mucha and Steph McCannon, all registered 11 kills apiece, but their numbers couldn’t take their squad to victory. The red and gold showed a .031 hitting percentage missing 35 hits and only notching 40 kills.

Hugdahl entered the match going for a personal career mark. She finished the contest tied with the all-time ISU record for number of career kills with 1235.

Nunez didn’t think UNI was in their prime. She felt her own netters played right into the Panther’s paws.

“UNI’s a good team. They don’t make a lot of errors. They are good at making their opponents make a lot of errors and that’s exactly what we did. We just fit in to what they like as a style of play,” she said. “We committed so many unforced errors. I don’t think UNI played very well. I just think we played worse.”

Coming off this recent loss, ISU will host another tourney in Ames this weekend and then venture to the land of the Hawkeyes Tuesday to battle Iowa.

Nunez, with the possibility of some major changes on Friday, is hoping her players will do what they are trained to do.

“I want them to just go out and play; don’t even pay attention to the score and play,” she said.

The Cyclones will take on Northern Illinois at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Texas Tech at 3 p.m. on Saturday and then Rhode Island later that night at 8 p.m. at the ISU Invitational in Hilton Coliseum.