WSU drops two at home

The Weber State University Volleyball Team took on the two top-ranked teams in the Big Sky Conference Friday, Oct. 30, and Saturday, Oct. 31. They fell to Northern Arizona University in three sets and fell to Northern Colorado University in five.
On Friday night Coach Al Givens said the team did not play like they should but also said that he was much happier with most of the team’s performance on Saturday.
“Pretty indicative of the entire season in a nutshell,” Givens said. “Our inability to close out sets when we’re up 24-21, its not the first time. There has been probably six or seven times when we’ve been up 24-21 and we haven’t been able to close out. It was way better than (Friday) night and I honestly just feel for our players. That would have been a great one to get in three.”
The Wildcats were on the wrong end of a 5-2 run at the end of the first set on Friday after being tied 20-20. The next set went much the same way, the score was 21-20 at one point, but then the Wildcats lost 25-22. The Wildcats never led in the third set and lost 25-16.
In the game against NAU, the Wildcats .440 in the first set, never trailed and ended up winning 25-20. The second set the Wildcats again were able to close out, winning 25-19 hitting .333. The tide turned halfway through the third set however.
“We just didn’t finish at the end,” senior Chelsea Bair said. “Arizona worked hard and we couldn’t close out that third set.”
WSU led 24-21 but let NAU back into the set and eventually ended up losing 28-26. The Wildcats would not recover from this and lost the fourth set 25-22 and hit only .091. In the fifth set WSU trailed the whole game and lost 15-8.
“I thought the biggest difference in the match was (NAU’s) blocking and defense,” Givens said. “They outdug us by 12 and outblocked us by nine. I thought we served better tonight than last night. We started out on fire and then if you look at our hitting percentages in the fourth and fifth set, they just continually went down.”
Senior Chelsea Bair hit .296 in the match and had 23 kills, three assists and four aces, and senior Amy Fackrell had 16 kills, a career high, and hit .355.
“If we just would have found out a way to close that game,” Fackrell said. “It’s just a big mental blow when they come back from 24-20 and we just didn’t get our momentum back. I think that our problem was that we were afraid that we were going to lose instead of trying to win. I think that’s what our problem was, not everyone stayed aggressive.”
Bair did say that the team played well against NAU.
“I think that we played really good volleyball tonight and we just needed to close out that game,” Bair said. “Or close out the rest of the games.”