Strong finishes could not offset sluggish starts for the Northern State volleyball team Saturday night.
The Wolves, who never led on the evening, dropped a 25-19, 28-26, 25-21 Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference match to the University of Sioux Falls at Wachs Arena.
Northern trailed 7-1 to start both the first and third sets of the match.
“That’s kind of been a struggle all season long, we’ve noticed,” said NSU senior Libero Abby Schauer. “It’s kind of been a trend, starting down and trying to fight back. We can’t really do that against good teams, so we just gotta make sure we’re not trying to play catch up all the time.”
The second set was a different story as the Wolves battled USF for most of the way. The score was tied at 11-11 before the Cougars scored six straight points to build a lead. The visitors maintained an advantage and were still up 23-17 before Northern came storming back. The Wolves scored seven of the next eight points to level the score at 24-24. However, NSU was never able to secure a set point and eventually fell in extra points.
“There’s things that you have control of and things that you don’t,” said Northern coach Brent Aldridge. “Volleyball is such a random game … it’s not black or white.”
The Wolves dug out of another hole in the third set, before the Cougars began to surge once again.
Sioux Falls used an aggressive service attack to get the Wolves out of system and limit what they could do offensively.
“Coaches have even said lately, we want to get our middles involved as much as we can,” said Northern’s Riley Batta. “Abigail (Brooks) is an amazing player and the other teams know that, so they’re like, we’re going to try to serve them deep and get them out of system so we can’t use Abigail. And our pins gotta make up for when our middles aren’t hitting the ball, so it’s a lot.”
As a result, USF was able to run its offense and did some major damage from the pins throughout the match.
“We did a nice a job I thought on their middles,” Aldridge said, “and not such a nice job on their pins.”
A big thorn in Northern’s side was Abby Haus. The lefty repeatedly racked up kills for the Cougars as Northern struggled with the reverse spin on the ball.
“It is a little bit tougher, mostly cause we just don’t see that. I think it’s harder for the block to line up with a different arm than they’re used to lining up,” Schauer said. “Obviously, we don’t have any of those on our team and we don’t get to see that in practice, and actually not in this whole conference in general. That was a tough adjustment for us to make and kind of happened a little bit too late.”
The Wolves have now lost three of their last four and find themselves in a battle with Minnesota Duluth and Winona State for the last two spots for the NSIC Tournament. All three teams have identical conference records.
Aldridge doesn’t want to do any scoreboard watching. He wants his team to control its own destiny.
“I’ve never been about that,” Aldridge said. “I’d rather not go, I know that sounds bad, I’d rather not go if we’re playing badly.”
Northern plays at Augustana on Friday and at Wayne State on Saturday to close out the regular season.
“I think we just have a few things to clean up before these next two games,” Schauer said. “Obviously, they’re really important. We’re fighting to get in the conference tournament.”
Needless to say, one of the things the Wolves will be focused on heading into the weekend is getting off to better starts and not having to play from behind the entire way.
“We got to come out right from the beginning. We need to have the energy, the momentum, this is some of our last year. We don’t want to end like that,” Batta said. “We want to go to the conference tournament. We want to prove people wrong, because obviously we haven’t been playing how we want to play. We have so many great players. We can turn it around. … We’ve got to play with our hearts.”
To see a complete box score, click on the following link:
https://nsuwolves.com/sports/womens-volleyball/stats/2025/sioux-falls/boxscore/14034
