Ten for 10 in the SEC, No. 3: Mizzou volleyball caps perfect regular season
This fall will mark 10 years since Missouri announced a seismic change: The athletics department would leave the Big 12 conference and join the SEC. Missouri’s new home has brought the department increased revenue, which has helped bankroll improvements like the South Endzone football facility and new softball stadium. But for virtually every sport, the move has brought new challenges, as well — better competition and more pressure to spend to keep pace.
Over the next 10 weeks, we will be counting down Missouri’s top 10 athletics moments from its first decade as a member of the SEC (which is actually nine years of competition because it took a year for the change to take effect). Note that wrestling, which has spent the past nine years as a member of the Mid-American Conference and will rejoin the Big 12 next fall, wasn’t considered for inclusion since it didn’t compete in the SEC.
For our next entry, we look back to Nov. 27, 2013, when the 33-0 Missouri volleyball team took to the Hearnes Center court for its final game of the regular season.
Previous Entries:
No. 10: Thomas' one-hitter clinches regional title
No. 9: Cunningham’s ‘flu game’ keys historic upset
No. 8: Mizzou opens Martin era with win over Iowa St
No. 7: Schweizer closes career with sixth NCAA title
No. 6: Mizzou women draw record crowd, top Tennessee
Even as the 2013 volleyball season progressed and Missouri kept winning, the Tiger players didn’t really talk about going undefeated. According to then-senior Lisa Henning, that was never one of the team’s goals.
The players always wanted to win the next game, of course. But finishing a season 34-0? That seemed too far-fetched to even discuss.
“We were never wanting to win all of our games,” Henning explained. “We wanted to win the game that we were about to play, but the pressure of being like ‘we can’t lose’ is so stressful. We were like, we can lose. Like, it doesn’t matter. We can lose. We don’t want to lose, but we can.”
But by the time Missouri prepared to take the court against Arkansas for its final match of the regular season, the players felt plenty of pressure to win. Somewhat ironically, by that point, the Tigers had already wrapped up a conference title, the first SEC championship won by any Missouri team since joining the conference the year prior. But with just one more win needed to seal the first ever undefeated season by an SEC champion and a Senior Night celebration looming after the match, the team felt a sense of urgency to finish the regular season a perfect 34-0.
“We were not going to be losing,” Henning said. “We were going to go out with a bang. … Nobody wants to lose on senior night, and nobody wants to play crappy and still win, so it was like we wanted to play how we knew how to play and kind of seal the deal with our undefeated season.”
That Missouri found itself in that position would have seemed impossible a few months prior. The Tigers struggled during the 2012 season, their first in the SEC. After making the NCAA Tournament each of the two prior years, the 2012 Missouri team went 10-10 in SEC play and, after losing four of their final six matches of the season, missed out on the postseason. The disappointing ending led to several players transferring out of the program.
In hindsight, former coach Wayne Kreklow said, that season was the best thing that could have happened to Missouri. The returning players came back hungry to redeem themselves. The phrase “something to prove” became a slogan for the 2013 squad, popping up on wristbands and team social media posts. Plus, the departures made room for the coaching staff to recruit a large freshman class, which included several players who would make an instant impact. Henning said the freshmen saw how hard the returning players attacked offseason training and quickly fell in line.
“I feel like that season kind of just set us up for — pardon my language — but just to be done with the bullshit,” Henning said. “We knew what we were capable of and we just wanted to show that instead of going through the drama.”
In its first chance to show what it was capable of, the 2013 team delivered. Missouri easily won all four matches during the season-opening Mizzou Invitational, dropping just a single set. The Tigers would not only go on to win all 15 of its non-conference matches, but entered SEC play having swept each of its past nine opponents three sets to none.
Despite the strong start, the Tigers didn’t receive a lot of love nationally, failing to crack the top 25 in the national rankings. In its SEC-opener, Missouri looked like a team hungry for respect. The Tigers dominated South Carolina in straight sets while hitting .559, the best mark in program history during a conference match. An even bigger statement opportunity arrived a couple weeks later, when No. 2 Florida traveled to Columbia. Each of the first three games came down to the wire, with Missouri winning two by a score of 25-23 then dropping the third, but the Tigers cruised to a decisive win in the fourth set, 25-18.
The win marked Missouri’s first ever victory over a top-five opponent and boosted the Tigers to No. 11 in the national rankings. When the team avoided a letdown and won both of its matchups the following week, at LSU and at Texas A&M, then beat No. 19 Kentucky the next weekend, Kreklow said he started to hear chatter about an undefeated season. He and his wife, co-head coach Susan Kreklow, opted to broach the topic with their players, but made sure to do so in a way that didn’t make expectations too burdensome.
“You can’t ignore it, you can’t pretend it’s not happening,” Wayne Kreklow said. “It’s just like the elephant in the room. It’s there, everyone knows it, so we might as well talk about it. … I think it kind of helped us address, looking at what we had done up to that point to get us so far towards an undefeated season two-thirds of the way through, and recognize what we were doing to make that possible and knowing that if that happens — if it doesn’t, that’s okay, too — but if it does, it’s going to be because we show up every day with the same kind of work ethic and attitude and attention to detail that we had back in September.”
Missouri’s biggest obstacle to that perfect campaign came on Nov. 15 when the team traveled to Gainesville for a rematch with Florida. By that point, the Tigers were 29-0 and ranked No. 7 nationally. Florida, ranked fifth, had lost just five SEC matches at the O’Connell Center during the previous 23 seasons.
Yet Missouri not only emerged victorious, but beat the Gators in straight sets. Current Missouri head coach Molly Taylor, who was a senior on that team, pointed to that match as the one she’ll always remember most from the 2013 campaign. Henning, who totaled 18.5 points during the match to become Missouri’s all-time points leader, said that victory illustrated one of the great strengths of that team: its ability to finish out close sets.
“That game, I feel like every set was like down to the wire,” Henning said. “Like, it was so close to where it was just about who made more mistakes. And at that point Florida was just making mistake after mistake, and all we had to do was be consistent and they were, for lack of a better term, panicking. And we just stayed on them and were consistent.”
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The win over Florida gave Missouri a two-game lead over the Gators in the SEC standings, plus the tiebreaker. Two matches later, Missouri topped Mississippi State at home to clinch the SEC title. It remains one of just two SEC championships a Missouri team has won since the athletics department joined the league, with volleyball winning the other one, as well, in 2016.
But the work wasn’t finished. By that point, the players had finally allowed themselves to start thinking about an undefeated season. And after the team dispatched Kentucky, all it had to do was handle Arkansas at home.
Not wanting any distractions, Taylor and Henning, Missouri’s two seniors that season, opted to hold Senior Night festivities after the game. But when Taylor saw the crowd of 7,437 packed into the Hearnes Center, she still struggled to keep her emotions in check until after the match.
“It was hard not to be emotional, because I think of everything at the end of your career and having those great memories behind you, and then having that moment when you have so much support,” Taylor said. “Looking back, there was so much more on the line than what I realized in that moment.”
Like it had just about all season, Missouri buzzed through the first two sets with ease, winning the first 25-11 and the second 25-16. In the third set, however, Arkansas hung with the Tigers, eventually taking a 24-23 lead. Not wanting to give Arkansas the momentum of a set win, Kreklow called timeout. Nearly eight years later, he can’t remember exactly what he told his players, but it was something along the lines of “think small.” That, along with “something to prove,” had become a mantra for the 2013 team. A key factor in the team’s success, Kreklow believes, was his players’ ability to hone in on individual points and matches rather than becoming overwhelmed by trying to finish a season 34-0.
“We used to say all the time, alright guys, we gotta think small here,” Kreklow said. “Think small. We gotta think the next touch, the next touch. We don’t need to look at the scoreboard, everything’s gotta become small. And you just think about the next contact, and I think that group was really good at really dialing into the small things when it got to that point in games.”
The other thing that set that Missouri team apart, Kreklow said, was its balanced, high-octane offense. While the Tigers had several stars, Taylor said there were no egos among the group.
“It took everybody on the team to get there, and I think that’s something that’s unique,” Taylor said. “We had stars and we had great players, but it really took everybody, and I think that’s what makes it such a great experience and such great memories.”
Taylor, the setter, quarterbacked the attack. Her 12.65 assists per set led the nation, and she was named SEC Player of the Year and a first-team all-American. Henning finished the season with 499 kills and earned all-SEC first team honors. Junior Whitney Little set program records for both hitting percentage and solo blocks. And freshman Carly Kan, despite lacking the usual size of an outside hitter at 5-foot-9, recorded 383 kills on a hitting percentage of .364 and was named the SEC Freshman of the Year.
All of that added up to Missouri finishing the regular season as the national leader in hitting, kills per set and assists per set. Kreklow explained that, due to its offensive ability, Missouri always felt good about its ability to “side out” — win a point and regain service off an opponent’s serve.
“They were an extremely efficient offensive team,” Kreklow said. “We obviously had a great setter, who at that point was a senior, really knew what she was doing in terms of decisions out on the court. We had great hitters. So it was very, very hard to stop us, and in volleyball, once the rally scoring era started, there was a massive shift towards offense being the great determiner of whether you win or lose. So having a great offensive team, it’s really hard to beat one of those because you just can’t stop them. ... So unless we made an error or made a mistake, we’re probably going to come back and win.”
With a perfect season on the line, that’s exactly what happened. Little tied the match after Taylor set her up for a kill. A few points later, Henning blocked an Arkansas attack and sealed the victory with a 29-27 win in the fourth set. The Missouri players on the court screamed, some raising fists in celebration, then hugged as the players from the bench swarmed onto the court to join in the embrace.
With the perfect regular season secured, both Henning and Kreklow remember feeling a flood of relief.
“I’m not the, you know, let’s run around the court a couple of times like Jim Valvano, one of those,” Kreklow said with a laugh. “Honestly, for me personally, it was just this big sigh of relief. I felt like it was just this big weight that was lifted off the shoulders, like thank God I don’t have to worry about this anymore.”
All three of Kreklow, Henning and Taylor said that, on the night Missouri beat Arkansas, it was impossible to appreciate what the team had just accomplished, in part because its season wasn’t yet over. The Tigers would eventually falter. In the second round of the NCAA Tournament, they drew a Purdue team that Kreklow felt was underseeded relative to its ability as a result of injuries during the regular season and that represented a bad matchup for Missouri due to its size. The Boilermakers ended the Tigers’ season with a 3-1 win.
Still, as time has passed, Kreklow — who stepped down from his post prior to the 2019 season — has gained a better appreciation for the extent to which his team dominated during the 2013 regular season. Not only did Missouri win all 34 of its matches, the Tigers never got pushed to a fifth set. They swept 26 of 34 opponents and won a ridiculous 102 of 110 total games on the year. The season also drew a new wave of fans to the program. Missouri’s final two home matches of the 2013 campaign still stand as the two largest home crowds in program history. The team ranked third nationally in home attendance across the 2013 season, its highest mark ever.
Now, when Kreklow thinks about the 2013 team, the thing he always comes back to is how many little things had to all go right to pull off the perfect season — how one key injury or illness or error at an inopportune moment could so easily have led to a loss. Yet, thanks to the team’s balance and poise (and, Kreklow admits, a bit of luck), Missouri’s 2013 regular season still stands as one of the best not only in school history but the history of the SEC.
“You realize, after all these years, it still hasn’t been replicated,” he said, “and so it is something that you appreciate more and more. At the time, you’re so wrapped up and involved in it, you don’t even realize a lot of times what’s going on around you. And then the farther you are away from it, the more you appreciate just what a special group. Because to do that over the course of the season is what makes it special.
“Anybody can get hot during a tournament. ... But to do that, to slog it out week in and week out over the course of a conference season and to come out undefeated in a Power Five league is really, really pretty incredible.”
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