Wednesday night, in front of a partially dressed-up Halloween crowd of 2,047 at Huff Hall, Illinois volleyball suffered yet another tough loss: The fourth consecutive loss, the sixth five-set loss, the seventh loss of a dreadful October and yet another chance to beat a ranked team that slipped through the Illini’s fingertips.

After so many emotionally draining defeats, the plan to bounce back is simple:

“Play more volleyball,” Annie Luhrsen said.

The senior setter and Connecticut transfer appears to have re-established herself as the team’s setter after being benched for freshman Alexis Viliunas a few weeks ago.

Illinois (10-13, 4-9 Big Ten) needs to win six of its final seven games to be eligible for the NCAA tournament, and remaining on the schedule is a road battle against No. 3 Penn State. However, taking things one step at a time, the Illini face one of the two teams with a poorer conference record than they did in Indiana (10-14, 2-10) on Saturday.

One of the biggest issues for the Illini right now, head coach Kevin Hambly said, is confidence.

“I think we’re fighting hard, but we’ve lost it (confidence),” he said. “We have to regain it by — the only way I know is to get wins.

“(On Wednesday), they (Illinois) didn’t stop, they weren’t gonna stop,” he added. “And they didn’t stop against Minnesota, they just — we didn’t have the confidence to make the plays at the end. To me, what it takes is we’ve gotta keep pushing and pushing, and we’ve gotta have a breakthrough. We’ve gotta get one of those wins.”

Luhrsen said the team is confident it will beat the Hoosiers.

“I think that it’d be bad to go into any match wondering whether you’re gonna win or not. … It’s not cockiness or anything, it’s just like we’re confident in our abilities, and we know that if we go out there and play to our best level, that we can beat anyone,” she said.

Redshirt freshman Ali Stark certainly did not play to her best level hitting-wise against Purdue, notching just three kills and six hitting errors on 25 swings for a -.120 hitting percentage. Hambly said she did well in other facets of the game but “looked uncomfortable” in her hitting.

Stark said she looked to remedy her struggles by getting in the gym and practicing hard before Saturday’s match.

Luhrsen was also in the gym, working on sets before practice, but with her senior season on the brink of being cut short, the motivation for players like her and senior middle Erin Johnson is different.

“We’re trying our best not to have any sort of different attitude about (the end of the season), but it is definite — like, there is an end to everything,” Luhrsen said. “And we’re realizing how close that could be, so that makes you want it, and it makes you wanna work that much harder every day in the gym and really just try to push and do your best.”

With only one loss to spare before their tournament outlook is truly “do or die,” the Illini are doing everything they can to make sure that one loss doesn’t come at the hands of the Hoosiers on Saturday.

“You can’t think about six out of seven matches, or you can’t think about the match as a whole, you just have to think about one point at a time,” Luhrsen said. “I think, at this point, we really just have to enjoy it because … there is a definite possible end, and it makes every moment a little bit more precious. Really, we’re working hard. We wanna win, but we wanna enjoy it as well.”

Eliot can be reached at [email protected] and @EliotTweet.