USU volleyball finishes four-game homestand with victories over San Diego State and Nevada
The Aggie volleyball team finished a four-game home streak with two victories this weekend against San Diego State and Nevada.
After a heartbreaking loss to UNLV last Saturday, the team was ready to come back strong before hitting the road next weekend.
The match against SDSU had all the spectators on the edges of their seats when it went into five sets.
The Aggies fell to the Aztecs in their first set, 25-22 but came back strong in the second and third sets to win 25-20 and 25-13.
The fourth set that night seemed to be a check-out time for the team as they hit less than half the percentage from the previous set, something that has happened quite a few times to USU this season.
Coach Grayson DuBose said this trend of not having consistent hitting percentage in consecutive streaks is due to the team relaxing and is something they are working on to continue to improve.
Utah State finished that SDSU match strong with a 15-11 win that brought good momentum for Saturday’s face-off with Nevada.
With the exception of the second set, the Aggies had a strong match that resulted in multiple players in double-digit digs and kills.
Maddie Day-Larsen was one who had 14 digs with one counting as a kill.
With October being the month for breast cancer awareness, Day-Larsen said her digs were preceded by extra motivation to contribute to the “Dig for a Cure” cause that runs through the month to raise money for research in finding a cure for breast cancer.
“It’s super important to me that we raise awareness for breast cancer because my mom is a survivor of breast cancer,” Day-Larsen said. “There are so many tough women out there who fight breast cancer every day and raising awareness and money and doing everything you can to stop breast cancer from taking all these wonderful women is super important.”
The Aggies won the match 3-1 and hit for a record .312 on the day, starting off strong in the first set hitting .467.
“That felt kind of like a men’s match, honestly, because men’s matches are so ‘King-Kongish,’” said Dubose, of the swagger and dominance his team played with in the first set. “I thought we were kind of Queen Kongish.”
USU finished out the day with a 25-19 victory over the Wolf Pack.
Next week the team will head to what DuBose calls the “meatgrinder” of road trips to Colorado State and Wyoming, two of the conference’s top opponents.
“If we can go and take care of us and the things we excel at and make the other teams uncomfortable then we’ll give ourselves chances and we’ll be real competitive,” DuBose said.
The next match for the Aggies will be Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in Laramie, Wyoming.