MacEwan Athletics and Huskies Athletics
SASKATOON – Close but no cigar.
That remains the refrain for the MacEwan Griffins as they came out on the wrong end of a 3-1 defeat at the Saskatchewan Huskies on Friday night (24-26, 26-24, 19-25, 18-25).
The loss drops their record to 1-12 on the Canada West men's volleyball season, while Saskatchewan improves to 6-9.
"At times, we were very good tonight and, as we sometimes have done, we just gave up too many runs of points," said Griffins head coach Brad Poplawski. "We'll be close in a set and all of a sudden you just give up three or four and you just run out of time. Our passing was part of the reason for that today, for sure."
Max Vriend had a solid game in the middle for MacEwan with 13 kills on .417 efficiency, adding seven blocks. Ryan Zachary added 10 kills, while Caleb Weiss had 29 assists.
Saskatchewan was led by Dylan Mortensen's 19 kills, while Colin Fraser had 12 and CJ Gavlas added 44 assists.
In the first set, Saskatchewan saw their biggest lead of three at 21-18 disappear quickly following a 4-1 Griffins run to tie the set at 22. Second-year Aidan Saladana set up the Huskies with a set-point opportunity at 24-22. The Griffins rallied back, but errors caught up to them as they gave Saskatchewan their final two points to take the first set 26-24.
An 11-6 Huskies lead in the second set was short-lived. A 5-0 run capped off by back-to-back blocks by the Griffins tied the set at 11. Both teams battled back and forth until the score was tied at 21. From there, a 4-1 run – featuring three kills from Zachary – put the Griffins in a good position to win the set, 26-24.
In the third, the Huskies wouldn't let MacEwan earn a lead. With the score at 17-16 for Saskatchewan, second-year Matthew Meyer put together a nice run at the service, earning five points for Saskatchewan during an 8-3 run to close the set, 25-19.
Second-year Gavlas came through for the Huskies in the final set, producing six points at the service in the set. With the score at 23-18 coming out of a Huskie timeout, Fraser had two kills, while Meyer delivered a service ace for the 25-18 win.
MacEwan ran with a relatively short bench, using just eight players in the match.
"The guys on the floor, first of all, they have to find a way," said Poplawski. "There wasn't anything where we needed to get a guy out there. Caleb set a pretty good match, Max was playing well, Ryan and Kai (Hesthammer) were OK and Petey (Jordan Peters) on the right was good. It wasn't that we needed to go to our bench.
"We just needed to make some key plays at times. We had some good digs and then we just weren't very good in transition off serve-receive to give us a chance."
While the Griffins dominated the blocking game at the net, they shot themselves in the foot with 18 service errors to just four aces.
"We worked on some things over Christmas, so I knew we'd miss more serves," said Poplawski. "It was a conscious effort to be more aggressive. The negative with that is you do put yourself at risk to miss some serves. This was the first time some guys were debuting some serves in match and it is a different feeling.
"To be honest, we didn't serve at the level needed. We have to take chances. I'm hoping we can do a little bit better job with our serve and be more efficient with our pass. If we can do that, that at least gives us a chance.
"Our block today was very good. I thought our guys paid good attention to details and we blocked quite well. We need to play better defence behind it, but if we can put a little more pressure on them with the serve and not give up runs of points with our passing, at least it gives us a chance."
The teams will meet again on Saturday (8 p.m. CST, Canada West TV).
