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Pepperdine Sweeps USC, Who Hit .000
The No. 19 Trojans got 27 kills and made 27 errors on 114 swings at the Galen Center. Pepperdine had not swept a ranked team on the road since 2013.
Pepperdine swept No. 19 USC 3-0 (25-12, 25-20, 25-17) at the Galen Center on Saturday night, and the Trojans came out of it hitting exactly nothing.
USC killed 27 balls and put 27 more into the net or outside the court, on 114 swings at it. That is a hitting percentage of .000, and it is the number the match will be remembered by.
Pepperdine got 34 kills and hit .178 themselves, and won by 26 points across the three sets. The Waves led 6-0 before USC scored.
Lilli Etter got the Trojans back to 13-9 in the first set with a kill. Pepperdine answered with seven points in a row, and the match never came back from it.
Irelynd Lorenzen finished with eight of Pepperdine's eleven blocks, a season high for her. Chloe Pravednikov led everybody on either side of the net with 11 kills.
Pepperdine's head coach Scott Wong told his own athletic department this after the match.
The Waves came out to make a statement tonight and started off with some really tough service pressure and never backed off. Proud of how we are coming together as a team and excited about what is ahead of us!
Pepperdine had not swept a ranked opponent on the road since 13 September 2013, when they did it to a Kentucky side ranked 19th, the same ordinal USC carried on Saturday.
The last time the Waves swept USC at all was in December 2005, and that one was a home match for them. USC had beaten UC Davis in four on Friday night, on the same floor, twenty-four hours earlier.
Pepperdine go to Santa Clara next weekend to open West Coast Conference play at 8-3. USC are ranked 19th and are 5-4, and Saturday was the fourth of those losses.
The coaches publish a new ballot on Monday morning, and it is the first chance the people who vote in it have had to say what they make of any of this.
