BATON ROUGE – The LSU volleyball team (5-11) is scheduled to host South Carolina (12-6) on Saturday and Sunday at PMAC at 1:00 pm CT on both days. Both games will be broadcast on SEC Network +.
After this weekend, the Tigers will have just two more weeks of competition. LSU will host Georgia next week for their last two home games of the season before traveling to face Tennessee in Knoxville to end the season that officially started last October.
“For everyone, it’s a fight to the end now,” said the head coach Fran Flory. “It is a question of who will finish well.”
LSU will try to end its three-game skid after falling to Ole Miss in the second game of the two-game set and then being swept by Kentucky, one of America’s best teams, last weekend. South Carolina, on the other hand, has a three-game winning streak in Baton Rouge.
“South Carolina is a very talented team,” explained Flory. “Mikayla Robinson is one of the best midfielders in the league and will be a physical matchup in the position of central blocker – certainly with two of the elite players in the league with Taylor Bannister and Mikayla on opposite sides of the court. Tom (Mendoza) did a great job in building this program and they are a very good volleyball team and are a group of very talented athletes. “
A veteran, Robinson is joined by freshman Ellie Ruprich as the top middle blockers in South Carolina. Rurprich, twice a week freshman at the SEC, is tied at 1.21 for the third highest number of blocks per set this season in the SEC . Robinson has a hit percentage of 0.328, the 10º best brand in the league.
South Carolina’s Riley Whiteside won her third freshman award of the week at the SEC last week after some career struggles against Ole Miss.
On the LSU side, Tigers are one of the most dominant players in the league, Taylor Bannister, which has accumulated the fourth largest number of excavations in the history of the program. This season, Bannister has the third highest number of deaths per set, with 4.23. Regulator Karli Rose passes the ball to Bannister almost a third of the time, as Bannister had 669 of the 2,187 Tigers’ total attacks this season. Rose, who has six doubles this season, has the sixth highest number of assists per set in the SEC with 9.66.
Paige Flickinger and Hannah Brister both were successful as external hitters. Flickinger, a freshman, has five double-doubles this season and has the second highest number of deaths (140), service aces (14) and digs (166) on the team. Brister joined the team in the semester, already with six games in the season, but it has already proved someone who can kill the third highest number of the team in the entire season with 89 and the second highest number of deaths per set with 2.47.