MANHATTAN, Kan. (U-WIRE) -- Thursday, it was back to the basics for the K-State volleyball team. Not 24 hours after suffering a 3-1 loss to Baylor, the Cats were back at practice, trying to correct what went wrong on Wednesday before its match Saturday against Oklahoma.

First serve is set for 7 p.m. at Ahearn Field House.

Coach Suzie Fritz wants to give her squad the opportunity to come out and compete.

"Our goal today was to try and create the most competitive environment that we can and to hold some people accountable for doing the little things that enable us to win matches," Fritz said. "I thought we accomplished that. They competed tremendously hard today and it was a very good practice. On a scale of one to ten, it was about a nine."

Ultimately, Fritz said that she would like to see her team always practice with that same intensity.

"It's important for us to have a practice like that every day, and that's the challenge," she said. "It's easy to play and compete in a comfort zone, where you really don't have to stretch your limitations physically, mentally or emotionally."

That comfort zone, she added, is something that her team has been struggling with recently.

"If we want to be comfortable in comfort situations, and intense situations, we have to create an environment in practice that forces us to compete at the very highest level, and I don't think we're there yet," Fritz said. "We're still learning how to compete."

Against Baylor, Fritz said, K-State kept with the Bears in every category except one, which ultimately did them in.

"What they did is they dug very well," Fritz said. "If you look statistically, we sided out at a higher percentage overall for the match, we hit for a higher percentage, and we blocked about equally. The difference between the match, statistically, was that they dug more balls than we did."

While the loss gave them a wake up call, Fritz said it was unfortunate that it came at the expense of a loss to Baylor.

"Unfortunately, we had to take a loss to kind of learn our lesson," she said. "This transpired 48 hours before the match -- I truly believe that. We had two very mediocre practice days leading up to the Baylor match, and I didn't have them prepared. I didn't have them physically, mentally and emotionally ready to play that team."

Overall, though, Fritz said her team is just physically worn out.

"They're tired, is what they are," she said. "Our goal is to always compete like we want to win the whole thing. But I think we got complacent. Maybe we overlooked Baylor in terms of trying to see some things down the road."

In looking down the road, Fritz said one of her goals is to win the Big 12 Championship. But to do that now, she said, K-State will have to stay focused.

"We do want to win the conference and we made it increasingly difficult on ourselves with that loss down there," Fritz said. "They understand that -- that they have to stay in the present tense and that our match with Oklahoma is as important as any match that we have on our schedule."

(C) 2003 Kansas State Collegian via U-WIRE.