For the first time all season, Illinois’ injury depleted volleyball team finally looked overmatched last weekend, losing a pair of matches to conference rivals Northwestern and No. 8 Wisconsin on Friday and Saturday night at Huff Hall.

The losses drop the Illini to 10-5 on the season and 1-3 in Big Ten play.

While injuries have bombarded the Illini all season, things were starting to look better early last week when senior outside hitter Rasa Virsilaite and freshman Rachel Henderson returned to the lineup.

But even the two additions were not enough to help the Illini this weekend. In Friday’s opener, poor serve receive and numerous attacking errors doomed the Illini as they fell to Northwestern, 30-18, 31-33, 31-29, 26-30 and 15-10.

The Illini hit a meager .147 on attacks during the match, including a zero attack percentage in the fifth game.

Senior Rachel VanMeter led the Illini with 24 kills on a career-high 82 swings, while Kayani Turner added 15 kills.

Lindsay Anderson led five Wildcats (10-3, 1-2) in double figures with 19 kills.

“We didn’t fire on the serve receive and on offense today,” Hardin said. “We hit dismal numbers out of the middle, and part of that was the shaky passing on offense.”

Hardin added that Illinois’ struggles were not just limited to their offense, as the Illini were unable to defend the Wildcats serves for most of the match.

VanMeter said she did see some positives during the match. Most notably, she said she was impressed by the effort of her teammates to battle into the fifth game despite struggling.

“Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and I thought we gave a tremendous effort in turning around the momentum of the game,” she said.

In Saturday’s match, the Illini were out gunned by Wisconsin 30-15, 30-22 and 30-21.

While Hardin had hoped the Illini would attack a little better against the Badgers (12-1, 4-0), they were unable to get going from the start and recorded a season-low .027 attack percentage for the match.

The Badgers, on the other hand, hit an astonishing .407 in the first game and finished at .283.

“When we can get the ball where it needs to be we can run our slide play,” Hardin said. “But when we don’t have the ball control, we’re feeding their outside.”

VanMeter was the only Illini to reach double figures in the match with 10 kills, while Meghan Macdonald added nine.

And with the Badgers swinging so well, Hardin said Illinois’ passing seemed rushed for much of the match. As a result, the Illini were unable to get into rhythm.

“When we were in system, we were playing with a top ten team,” he said. “When we’re out of system, it’s ugly out there, and this is not a quick fix.”

Hardin expects the team to continue to struggle until they are able to solidify a starting lineup, but knows they cannot use their injuries as an excuse.

Macdonald and VanMeter were added since the Illini are beginning their Big Ten schedule. They need to regroup quickly before they fall too far back in the conference race.

Macdonald was also quick to compliment the Badgers.

“I think they played really well, you could see when we were with them, and then we just fell apart,” she said.

The Illini will take the rest of week off before heading to Michigan and Michigan State over the weekend.

Hardin and the Illini hope to fix their problems as soon as they can, but VanMeter knows it won’t be easy. First, she said, they need to find what they have to fix.

“If we knew,” she said, “We’d fix it.”