HONOLULU - UC San Diego had a difficult time with No. 5 Hawai'i, falling 3-0 in a Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) men's volleyball match Friday night in front of 3,162 fans at the Stan Sheriff Center. Scores were 25-20, 25-16 and 25-17.
UCSD, coming off of back-to-back wins in non-conference activity, dropped to 3-6 overall and 0-5 in the MPSF. UH stayed a perfect 6-0 at home with a 15th straight triumph there dating back to last year, moving to 7-1 overall and 2-1 in league play.
The first two sets were largely controlled by the Rainbow Warriors, as they scored the initial point of each frame and never trailed, with just a single tie score at 1-1 early in the second. The third was more tightly-contested, featuring five lead changes and six ties.
Sophomore opposite Tanner Syftestad reached double figures again in kills after five straight performances in single digits, totaling a team-high 11. Ian Colbert added seven kills, with fellow junior outside hitter Josh Schmidt contributing six. Schmidt drew his first start as a Triton after putting down 10 kills in just two frames in his UCSD debut on Wednesday night, helping to rally his side to a five-set victory. Senior libero Tanner Howard handled eight digs as UCSD had 23 as a team to 22 for UH.
Sinisa Zarkovic led all players with 12 kills on. 476 (12-2-21) hitting. Setter Jennings Franciskovic wound up with 32 assists, five kills, four blocks and two digs. Libero Kolby Kanetake collected a match-high nine digs. UH had six aces and 10.5 total team blocks to one and 6.0, respectively, for the visitors.
A triple block by Franciskovic, Kupono Fey and Iain McKellar gave UH a 6-4 lead in an opening set that had zero runs by either side of more than two points. Triton timeouts came at deficits of 12-7 and 20-15, both after back-to-back points by UH.
It was 9-5 Hawai'i at the first break in the second, as the hosts came out blazing offensively with perfect 5-for-5 hitting, and came up with another triple block for 7-4 by Franciskovic, McKellar and Zarkovic. A lengthy 6-0 run, with two McKellar aces, made it a 13-5 bulge, with a four-point swing making it 17-7. Though UCSD closed to within five at 18-13 by tallying six of the next seven, it couldn't get back into it.
UH trotted out to a 15-10 advantage at the media timeout in the final set, and stayed ahead by at least four points over the remainder to finish off the sweep.
"Early on in the match, we were passing very well but not getting good offensive production out of those passes," said UCSD head coach Kevin Ring. "That's one thing we talked about between sets two and three and after the match, that if we're passing that well, we've got to be able to generate some offense out of that. We hang that on our setters a little bit. We want them to take some ownership of our offense. Then for the attackers, we took some good swings, but also took a few careless ones, some balls that maybe we're not going to be able to get a kill on, that we made some errors.
"Hawai'i sided out very well tonight. They are probably one of the better passing teams in the MPSF this year, so far that I've seen. On Sunday when we play them again, we're going to have to take some chances and really go for our serves a little bit more. I thought we actually did a decent job of blocking and defending. When we served well, they passed off the net and their offense slows down. Then we had a chance to actually form some good blocks and play defense around it.
"It's going to be a challenge on Sunday as to serve a little tougher and try to push them off the net with their passes. We have to have a semblance of an offense from our side. We kind of went away from our middle attack, even with some good passes, so we definitely need to get everyone involved."
UCSD and UH meet again this Sunday night, Jan. 31. First serve inside the Stan Sheriff Center is set for a 7 p.m. PT (5 p.m. HT).
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