AMES – The Iowa State Cyclones defeated the West Virginia Mountaineers 3-1 Thursday at Hilton Coliseum. The victory marked their sixth straight against the Mountaineers and put them at 26-4 in the series.
The serving on both sides of the ball made a significant impact on the game. The Cyclones and Mountaineers each tied their second-most amount of service errors this season. The Cyclones also tied their season high in service aces.
Senior middle blocker Tierney Jackson ended the night leading the team with four aces, the second-most both in this season and in her two years at Iowa State.
“It’s exciting,” Jackson said. “I like that I can bring something other than offensively or defensively to the team. Whenever I’m struggling with one thing, I’ll make it up in a different way.”
According to Jackson, it isn’t by luck that the team tied their season high in aces.
“Michelle [Aggen] is calling out our serving spots,” Jackson said. “They work all the time to figure out where our serving targets are, where they struggle the most and where they’re out of system the most.”
In the Cyclones’ 25-14 first set loss, they were outkilled 14-10 and had five attack errors compared to the Mountaineers’ zero.
“I don’t think we executed our game plan,” head coach Christy Johnson-Lynch said. “We were making lots of mistakes. Just sloppy, just nothing but going up for stuff. We made a couple changes, and I thought we started to execute a little better.”
In the second, third and fourth sets, the Cyclones saw noticeable increases in kills and aces compared to set one. The Cyclones won the second, third and fourth sets 25-22, 25-20 and 25-21.
“We definitely changed our mindset in the second set,” senior outside hitter Maya Duckworth said. “I feel like we really just found ourselves and just took it all the way through to the fourth set.”
With the win, the Cyclones move to a 15-3 record for the season. Iowa State is also 5-2 in conference play and in fifth place in the Big 12 Conference standings.
The Cyclones take on the Arizona Wildcats, who are currently 9-6 overall and 3-2 in conference play, at 6:30 p.m. Thursday.
