No. 1 Nebraska displayed every skill that\u2019s made it a powerhouse program \u2014 the offense attacked every part of the court, defense never gave up on the ball and the fans showed up at the Galen Center.<\/p>\n
In front of a sellout crowd of 9,072, USC\u2019s nine-match win streak came to an end with a straight-set loss to Nebraska (26-0, 16-0 Big Ten). <\/p>\n
\u201cI just felt like the game was a little too fast for us today,\u201d USC coach Brad Keller said. \u201cI thought it was slow for them and fast for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The No. 17 Trojans never led and were limited to a 20% point scoring percentage throughout the match. USC (20-6, 11-5) led in attacks, but its 16 errors were costly during the 25-13, 25-16, 25-20 loss to the Cornhuskers. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
USC\u2019s Adonia Faumuina taps the ball over the net against Nebraska at the Galen Center on Sunday.<\/p>\n
(Kim Ly \/ USC Athletics)<\/p>\n
\u201cNebraska is the real deal,\u201d Keller said. \u201cThey are really, really good and they showed that today from point one to the very end. They\u2019re hitting .400 and they held us down to .156, that kind of shows you a lot of where they were.<\/p>\n
\u201cGo Big Red Nation deserves credit and they deserve the fact that they travel and they support their team.\u201d<\/p>\n
USC outside hitters London Wijay, with 10 kills, and Adonia Faumuina, with nine kills, kept the Trojans in as much as possible throughout the three sets. After a break, the Trojans came out with some extra gusto to make things a little interesting for the Cornhuskers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe literally had nothing to lose,\u201d Faumuina said. <\/p>\n
During the match, Nebraska made 10 errors, with five spread across the first two sets. The Huskers moved the ball quickly around the court and if they made a mistake, the team quickly adjusted. In the third set, a ball bounced in the air close to the floor seats. Nebraska saved the ball and it later led to a kill by Virginia Adrian that put the Huskers three points from closing out the game.<\/p>\n
Nebraska kept USC guessing, while exploiting the weaker USC back court and capitalizing on attacking errors. Throughout the match, they kept hitting the ball to the back, usually resulting in a point for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were some plays they made that I haven\u2019t seen in a while and that was normal for them,\u201d Keller said.<\/p>\n
As the Trojans look ahead to their next match against Oregon on Wednesday, Keller doesn\u2019t have a silver lining take-away from the loss. <\/p>\n
\u201cI love my team, I don\u2019t care what their age is,\u201d Keller said. \u201cThere needs to be a standard and we need to execute and if we don\u2019t execute, we go back to the drawing board, we work on those things, we get better and we execute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wijay said the loss exposed how much harder the Trojans must work to achieve their goals. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to brush off this loss,\u201d Wijay said. \u201cI think it\u2019s good to use as fuel for the next game. It was a good test to see how far we are to get to that level. And I feel like the silver lining is to make sure that we\u2019re all gonna be in the gym working even harder to make sure that we pursue the balls.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it made me more hungry to want to win,\u201d Wijay added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 1 Nebraska displayed every skill that\u2019s made it a powerhouse program \u2014 the offense attacked every part…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4472,29693,423,12111,34909,30260,48,52,51,47,50,49,3289,22169,17677,18158,1417,34910,427,23138,3533],"class_list":["post-56459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ball","tag-cornhuskers","tag-game","tag-huskers","tag-keller","tag-kill","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-loss","tag-match","tag-nebraska","tag-no","tag-point","tag-straight-set","tag-team","tag-trojans","tag-usc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}