The Illinois men’s club volleyball team came up short this past weekend losing in the semifinals to the University of Marquette at the Hawkeye-Illini Classic in Iowa City, Iowa. The Illini were undefeated through the tournament before meeting the Golden Eagles.

After splitting the first two games with their Midwest rival, the Illini (4-1) blew a 12-10 lead in the deciding game. They gave up five straight points en route to their first loss of the year.

“We didn’t capitalize on our lead and that’s something we’ll have to work on,” said sophomore libero Pat Condron.

Despite being successful with rotating starting lineups all day, the Illini were victimized by ruts with certain lineups in the semifinals and the Golden Eagles (6-1) took advantage.

“We tried a lot of different things this weekend, a lot of different lineups,” said sophomore outside hitter Kevin Deeke. “We learned from the loss and now we know what we need to do. It’s just a matter of doing it.”

The Illini were also without senior middle blocker Ryan Fabrizius, who was forced to miss the tournament with knee problems. Fabrizius not only brings leadership to the table for Illinois, but more importantly, a 6’8″ frame.

“Ryan was a key injury,” junior setter Chris Walstra said. “We had a freshman playing in his place, which I think affected us a little bit. We still felt we should’ve won. As a whole, we didn’t play as well as we could have.”

Fabrizius was back practicing on Tuesday. Illinois breezed through pool play, piling up a plus-48 point differential. The squad didn’t give up more than 20 points in any game until their second-round meeting with the University of Iowa. All three pool-play opponents fell to the Illini in two games. They defeated Division-III St. Ambrose University, Illinois State University and Division-II Quincy University. This gave the Illini a No. 1 seed going into the tournament and a first-round bye.

After dropping their first game to the University of Iowa 25-22, Illinois bounced back to overwhelm the Hawkeyes in the final two games 25-15, 15-8. Up against a well-coached Marquette squad, the Illini won the first game 25-20 before dropping the last two games 25-16, 15-12.

Even with the loss, the Illini are upbeat about the upcoming tournament in two weeks at Lewis University.

“This one is going to be very tough,” Deeke said. “We’re going up against a lot of upper-level teams. If we go through practice, and do what we need to get done, I don’t see why we couldn’t come out in at least the top two.”

The squad will look to tighten things up on offense to prevent the ruts that did them in against Marquette and work on the blocking that Walstra believes still needs work. Fabrizius also felt that consistency needed to be improved upon.

“Now that (Fabrizius) is kind of coming back a bit and starting to feel better, I think we’ll be playing at a much higher level than we have been,” Condron said.