A day after beating No. 8 Cal, the Oregon women’s volleyball team had a chance to further its foothold among the conference and national elite.
But Oregon (15-4 overall, 5-4 Pacific-10 Conference) didn’t come close, as No. 3 Stanford (17-2, 8-1) swept the Ducks in three games 30-20, 30-18 and 30-18, ending Oregon’s longest conference winning streak in school history at four games.
“We still feel like it was a successful weekend,” coach Jim Moore said in an Oregon press release. “Stanford is a really good team and you can’t beat a team of Stanford’s caliber making the amount of errors that we did tonight.”
Oregon didn’t register a positive hitting percentage in any of the games, hitting -0.88 for the match. Senior hitter Erin Little led the Ducks with eight kills and a .208 hitting percentage.
Freshman middle blocker Sonja Newcombe, last week’s Pac-10 player of the week, contributed seven kills and was the only other Oregon player to hit for a positive percentage.
“We had too many hitting errors on the night, for seemingly no reason,” Moore said. “But we’ll definitely take these results over this weekend and continue to build on them.”
Sophomore libero Katie Swoboda led both teams with 17 digs while junior Karen Waddington led the team with eight blocks.
Oregon held two separate leads against Stanford throughout the match. The Ducks went up 1-0 in game one and gained its largest lead of the night at 9-6 in game 3. After leading by three, the Ducks surrendered 10 straight points to fall behind 16-9.
Stanford’s sophomore middle blocker Foluke Akinradewo led the Cardinal with 10 kills, along with nine blocks as the team posted a season-high 15 blocks against Oregon. Sophomore outside hitter Cynthia Barboza also added nine kills for Stanford, followed by senior Kristin Richards with six kills.
Oregon now sits in fifth place in the conference standings, one game behind Washington.
This week the Ducks will head to Corvallis Friday for the second Civil War match of the season. Oregon beat the Beavers (3-14, 0-8) 3-1 in the first meeting, winning 30-25, 30-25, 24-30 and 30-16.
[email protected]