The Western Nebraska Community College volleyball team opened conference play with a 4-set win over Trinidad State College Friday night at Cougar Palace.
The Cougars won 25-19, 16-25, 25-19, 25-23 to improve to 16-6 on the year while Trinidad drops to 17-5.
WNCC will have another conference game Saturday when they host Otero College at 2 p.m. at Cougar Palace.
Tamika Eastman, sophomore from Harrison, said the team played determined against a talented Trinidad team.
“I think we played with a lot of defense and that was our main thing. The foundation was defense and made the other team make mistakes. We were waiting for the other team to make mistakes and we saw that in the closing set where the other team kept hitting it out. If we did our job on defense, then we were able to run our offense and let them make mistakes.”
The key in the match was the Cougars eliminating Trinidad’s long service runs. That was the main culprit in the second set when Trinidad State won. The other three sets where the Cougars won, Trinidad didn’t have service runs over three points.
“I felt like we were learning from our mistakes. If something went wrong the one time you just have to change up and try something different like in serve receive that one time where we got stuck in, we just stepped up and made sure it didn’t happen the rest of the game.”
More Importantly, the win was huge since it was the opening of the conference slate of games and the Cougars moved to 1-0 in conference. The Cougars will be looking for conference win number two on Saturday against Otero. Eastman said they just need to stay together and as one.
“We just need to staying composed for one thing and that will take care of the rest,” she said.
The first set saw WNCC jump to a 6-1 lead behind four points from Eastman and led led 9-2. Trinidad came back and cut the deficit to a single point on several occasions, the last one at 20-19. That was when Eastman hammered a kill and then Nora Marginean served the final four points with Chloe Grady getting the final kill for the set winner.
The second set saw Trinidad get a couple long service runs and led 11-7 and later 22-13 before winning the second set 25-16.
The third set saw Trinidad lead 6-2 before Nadiyyah Northern had a kill and then Taylor Tyser had three points to tie the set at 6-6. The Trojans went up 10-8 before WNCC took a 12-10 lead on three Finja Schul points.
WNCC went up 19-13 after three more Tyser points and captured the third set 25-19 after Eastman had a kill for a 24-19 lead and then Eastman served the final point while Northern and Dessiah Christopher got the set-ending block.
The fourth set saw a battle as Trinidad led 13-9 and later 15-10. Schul then got a kill and Zwart served five points for a 16-15 lead. Trinidad tied things at 16-16, but Schul got another kill and Ahleejah Tovo-Sunia had five points for a 22-16 lead.
The Trojans came back to make it a 24-23 WNCC lead before the Cougars got the final point for the 25-23 win.
Tyser led the Cougars with 10 service points followed by Zwart with nine points and Eastman and Tovo-Sunia each with seven. Marginean had six points while Schul had three.
On the offensive side, Zwart tallied 11 kills along with six digs five assisted blocks, while Eastman had eight kills and nine digs. Schul finished with seven kills and five blocks, while Tovo-Sunia had three kills and two each for Christopher, Northern, and Marginean.
Marginean also had 26 set assists with 13 digs, while Tyser tallied 23 digs and three aces. Alex Gonzales-Orozco had four digs.