FAIRBANKS, Alaska – The Alaska Nanooks fell to their first GNAC opponent tonight, Oct. 3 at the Patty Center. After starting the season 4-0 in conference play, the Nighthawks of Northwest Nazarene came north and spoiled the party for the 'Nooks. Alaska would take a 2-1 lead heading into the fourth set before falling in four and five. The final scores from the match were, 26-28, 25-21, 25-20, 15-25 and 12-15.
Set one saw the offense become the topic of the night. Both teams came out firing as NNU tallied 23 first set kills on their 28 total points. They combined that with a .395 hit percentage in the first set, the highest of the match on either side of the net. The Nanooks nearly matched the percentage efforts, with a .316 hit percentage, and even won the error category, but only 15 first set kills proved to be the difference maker.
Set two saw the Nanooks turn the corner and show why they were undefeated coming into the day's game.
Kim Wong led the way for the 'Nooks on the attack yet again, with 19 kills and an incredible .631 hit percentage.
Tatum Upchurch and
AveRee Reynolds played the supporting cast behind Wong as Upchurch brought home 12 kills, and Reynolds, for the fourth game in a row, tallied double-digit kills with 11 on 34 total attempts.
The Nanooks grabbed set two, 25-21 and then grabbed the third set, 25-20, taking a 2-1 lead into the fourth set. Set four saw the re-emergence of the Nighthawk attackers as they went from a .097 second-set hit percentage and .054 in set three, all the way up to a .282 % in the fourth, backed by 15 kills and four errors.
Statistically, this game was one of the closest games on paper, but the small mistakes were the big take away for head coach
Brian Scott in his postgame interview, "Unfortunately it didn't go our way tonight. When you have a game that is this close statistically, we have to make sure that the little things are there. We talk about how much those little things matter and when it mattered we had silly hitting errors, communication errors, and some crunch time serving errors … We need to forget it, we need to learn for it, but we need to grow now and get ready to go in another 48 hours."
Those small mistakes did not show up as much in the fifth set, but the previous sets errors had a lasting effect. NNU regained all the momentum and grabbed an early 10-4 lead over Alaska. The Nanooks had one last go in them, however. Pushing the final-set score back to 13-11, NNU, the 'Nooks could see the breaking point. Unfortunately, a service error was the final straw. This gave set and match-point to the Nighthawks who capitalized two points later on a
Tatum Upchurch attack error.
The Nanooks drop their first GNAC conference game of the year, but there is still a lot more season left to play. Alaska will host another tough opponent this Saturday, Oct. 5 when the Central Washington Wildcats come to town. CWU, who was a West Region NCAA participant in 2018, are off to a strong start in 2019 with an 8-5 record, and 3-2 showing in GNAC play this far. First service is scheduled for 2 p.m. on Oct. 5.
For more information on the Alaska Nanooks volleyball team, follow @NanooksVB on Twitter, or like the Alaska Nanooks Volleyball team page on Facebook.
