The Shockers didn’t just have a match to win; they had a first place spot in The American to claim for their own.

They succeeded.

No. 22 Wichita State and SMU headed into the match with identical conference records and a share of the No. 1 position in the AAC.

“I really felt like we were in a fight tonight,” head coach Chris Lamb said. “I know the score may not have shown that, but I know what SMU is capable of.”

The Shockers got off to a slow start to the match after the Mustangs won by two in the first set. Wichita State answered by winning the next three in a row.

“We kept on saying that we had to keep pushing through,”  senior Emily Hiebert said. “It wasn’t going to be easy. [We need to] keep playing our game.”

WSU couldn’t rely on their dominant offense to win the match for them. The focus had to switch to the defense to secure the win.

Lamb considers Wichita State’s defense a weakness that the team had focused on and worked through for the victory.

“We have a lot of strengths and we’re trying to show up our weaknesses. We work on them and demand them,” Lamb said. “For them to finally see the fruit of their labors will take a lot of weight off their shoulders.”

The Shockers were winning by high scoring matches in previous conference games, so the team thought it was refreshing to see their ability to win matches in various ways.

“I think its really nice to know we can win by doing other stuff,” Hiebert said. “Throughout earlier on in the conference we were scoring a lot,so now its nice to see we can win other ways.”

Despite WSU’s heavily focused on defensive effort, senior Abbie Lehman had a season high for kills.

Lehman attacked the net with a total of 20 kills; the same number as SMU’s two leading attackers combined.

The Shockers advanced to 7-0 in conference play going into Sunday’s 1 p.m. match up against Tulsa. A win over Tulsa will get Lamb his 400th win at Wichita State in his 18th season.