The Oklahoma Sooners have become a thorn in the side of the Texas A&M volleyball program.
Unranked Oklahoma handed No. 21 Texas A&M its first loss in its new home Wednesday, sweeping the Aggies 25-23, 25-21, 25-23 in front of 1,425 at Reed Arena.
Oklahoma had never won in College Station before 2006 when the Sooners opened the Big 12 season with a 3-0 victory at G. Rollie White Coliseum. The Sooners did it again in 2007, beating the Aggies 3-2 in another Big 12 opener.
The Aggies won 3-2 last season at G. Rollie White, but the Sooners outhit A&M .257 to .185 and pulled out close victories in Games 1 and 3 to win in Aggieland for the third time in four years.
"This particular group [of Sooners] has been playing together for awhile, and they are a very experienced team and very underrated team," A&M head coach Laurie Corbelli said.
The Aggies (13-5, 6-4) had won their first seven matches at Reed Arena.
Oklahoma (13-6, 6-4) is 2-2 over its current stretch of five straight matches against ranked teams. The Sooners will face No. 5 Nebraska in Lincoln, Neb., on Saturday.
"It was important to us to prove that our last match against Baylor, a ranked team, wasn't a fluke," OU head coach Santiago Restrepo said. "We had Texas in the first two sets with set points and we lost them, and we had Nebraska in the second set and we lost it and we lost in the fifth set, so it was a matter of playing those crunch-time points better. And we did."
Game 1 was tied at 22 when OU setter Brianne Barker dumped the ball for a kill. Francie Ekwerekwu knocked down another kill to give OU a 24-22 lead. A&M's Sarah Ammerman kept the Aggies in it with a kill, but a ball-handling error by Ammerman on the next point gave the Sooners the game.
OU opened a 19-12 lead in Game 2 as the Sooners zeroed in on A&M's game plan. Ammerman had 44 kill attempts, almost twice as many as any other Aggie, and the Sooners seemed to catch on, though the Aggies said their game plan got disrupted by their own bad passing.
"Sarah got a lot of attempts in part because defensively we weren't putting balls on target and we were only giving ourselves one or two options," A&M's Jennifer Banse said. "It's tough for the setters when we can't put the ball on target. It's hard to know what to do with it."
It led to OU's Game 2 victory.
"Defensively we weren't where we've been in the past," Ammerman said. "For whatever reason, we were one step off where we usually are."
In Game 3, OU seized an 8-3 lead, but the Aggies responded by winning 8 of 9 points, including six in a row on Mary Batis' serve.
OU retook the lead at 14-13, but A&M's Jola Kelner, in for starting setter Kristen Schevikhoven, won three straight points before serving long.
"We had some very untimely service errors which stopped some of our efforts at getting runs of points," Corbelli said. "I think the team tonight felt that was a big blow when that happened."
Tied at 19, OU took control of Game 3 with a dink by Bridget LaPlante and a block by Ekwerekwu.
Ammerman and Banse each had kills to close the gap to 24-23, but A&M was unable to win another service point, and OU's Sarah Freudenrich sent the Aggies sprawling to the sideline and back line with two massive attacks over the final four points to clinch the match.
"I never really saw everybody at one time in it," Corbelli said. "When this whole team is in it together, they are hard to beat and we proved that against Nebraska. That is why we are ranked. When we have a few that don't come to play, then we are not and it's that way with any team."
Ammerman led A&M with 13 kills and had 10 digs for her team-leading eighth double-double. Banse had a team-high 12 digs to go with 12 kills and a team-leading hitting percentage of .435.
OU only had Caitlin Higgins in double figures in kills with 11, but four Sooners, led by Suzy Boulavsky's 16, had at least 10 digs.
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