They booked the last flight out of Hilo in hopes of a quick match Monday night and the Dixie State volleyball team was right on time, but not in the way they hoped to catch the plane ride back to Utah.
They booked the last flight out of Hilo in hopes of a quick match Monday night and the Dixie State volleyball team was right on time, but not in the way they hoped to catch the plane ride back to Utah.
The University of Hawaii at Hilo knocked off the front-running Trailblazers in four sets, 27-25, 21-25, 25-20 and 25-16 in the Vulcans’ gym to record their second straight win and even their Pacific West Conference record at 5-5 (7-8 overall) with perhaps their best effort of the season.
The defeat sent Dixie State (8-2, 1-6), to its second consecutive defeat at the end of a four-match swing through the islands and left coach Robyn Felder wondering what happened.
“We lost our sense of who we are,” Felder said, “but give credit where it’s due, Hilo is good, they outplayed us. We played them earlier and we all said, ‘That’s a good team, we will need to be ready for them in Hawaii.’
“We weren’t ready,” Felder said. “our upperclassmen didn’t play like we expect our upperclassmen to play.”
Senior Marley Strand-Nicolaisen and junior Siera Green led the way for the Vulcans who are making some noise in the conference as teams approach the midway point of the season.
“This was good,” said UHH coach Tino Reyes, “they were the best team in the league coming in here. They were 8-1 and Cal Baptist was 9-1, but they beat Cal Baptist, so this is, basically, what the best teams in our conference are like and we came out played pretty well.”
Strand-Nicolaisen had 20 kills, including six in the first and fourth games, hitting at a robust .316 percentage while adding 20 digs.
“It was one our best of the season, for sure,” she said, “it might have been my best, too; our confidence is up right now, it feels real good and this was a team we thought we could beat.
“We lost to them in four sets earlier,” Strand-Nicolaisen said, “but we all thought we let it slip away, we thought we could beat a team like that and tonight we just took it to them.”
The Vulcans started out strong and hardly looked over their shoulder, winning the first set without ever trailing, though they had to get two extra points to do it and those came from a Strand-Nicolaisen kill.
In the second set, the Trailblazers went from a 7-7 tie to a 15-9 lead and were able to hold that advantage the rest of the way. UH-Hilo had 16 kills and 14 blocks — five by Kyndra Trevino-Scott — in the third set and they never trailed in the fourth going from a 14-14 tie to a 25-16 win as Strand-Nicolaisen and Green paced the attack.
“Our confidence is way up there now,” said Green, who finished with 17 kills, “we just have to maintain some focus and keep it up and see how many wins we can get.”
At 5-5, the top of the conference looks a long way off, but there’s a lot of volleyball left to play and no reason to think upward mobility isn’t possible.
“You never know,” said Reyes, we need a couple of those teams up top to come back to the pack a little bit and it could get interesting, if we continue to do our part.”
Next up is a Thursday match at 7 p.m. against Notre Dame de Namur (3-8) in the Vulcans gym.