The Illinois volleyball team’s NCAA Tournament chances took a huge hit over the weekend as the Illini lost a pair of home matches to Michigan and Michigan State.

The Illini were defeated by the Wolverines on Friday 34-32, 32-30 and 30-26 and on Saturday against the Spartans 30-26, 30-16 and 30-22.

“I don’t know if I am surprised by this, but it’s definitely something I’ve been afraid of,” Illinois head coach Don Hardin said afterwards. “We’ve been playing pretty well considering our injuries, but I always knew something like this was possible.”

In the first game of Friday’s match, the Illini were able to hold off Michigan’s game-point several times, but the Wolverines eventually got the score they needed for the two-point win. The second game proved to be more of the same, but once again the Wolverines were able to pull out the victory.

“We just haven’t been able to close out games, I’m not really sure why,” Hardin said. “I bet, off the top of my head, I can name about 12 games this season where we had a chance at the end and couldn’t close it out.

“It’s very discouraging because we’ve played well until the last few points and then we can’t finish,” he said.

Saturday turned out to be more of the same. Up two points midway through game one, the Illini offense suddenly stalled and the Spartans roared past for a close win. The Illini were unable to recover from the loss and fell easily in games two and three.

“In the first game, we sort of played back and forth with them,” Illini defensive specialist Beth Vrdsky said. “We didn’t do anything like that in games two and three.”

For the match, Illini hit a dismal .082 while Michigan State hit .425. In game two, the Spartans out-hit the Illini .520 to -.027.

“Our offense was definitely out of rhythm today, even on the good passes we had,” Hardin said. “We just couldn’t make the scores we needed to have a chance.”

The losses drop the Illini to 13-9 overall and a disappointing 4-8 in the Big Ten. Michigan State improves to 15-7 and 6-6 while Michigan is now 17-8 and 4-8 in the conference.

“We had been playing pretty well with the lineup we had,” Hardin said. “But now, after this weekend, I don’t know how much longer we can play like this. If we struggle like this against Northwestern (on Wednesday), we’ll have to make some lineup changes. We can’t let this happen again.”