Lady Vikes Test Cardinals

MOSES LAKE – BBCC knew going into Wednesday night's match versus the North Idaho College Cardinals that they would have their hands full. After battling injuries over the past few weeks, the Lady Vikes were finally able to put their regular line-up on the floor against the 16-1 Cardinals.

The Lady Vikes have seemed to get off to slow starts throughout the course of the season and set number one was no different. The Lady Vikes came out sluggish losing the first set by a score of 25-14. Although BBCC has come out slow to begin matches, they have also proven to turn it on throughout the course of a match. Going up against one of the top teams in the NWAC in NIC, the Lady Vikes went punch for punch in the following two sets, dropping the second by a score of 25-23 and dropping the third and final set by a score of 25-22. Casey White put together another stellar showing collecting 9 kills while Emma Lucas continued to do her thing, dishing out 20 assists throughout the match.

Finally having their A-Team back on the floor together, Head Coach Alexa Moser had this to say regarding the match. "It was nice to have our regular line-up back to night. With Dakota Killian coming off the ankle injury from last week, I didn't know how things would go. That's sometimes a harder injury to come back from mentally than physically when you play at the net, but she didn't miss a beat. She came out aggressive, both swinging and blocking and the rest of the girls fed off of that. We've been stressing ball control and executing in practice this week and you wouldn't have thought that until part way through the second set. It's always frustrating when you don't see the correlation from practice to game play, and not executing the game plan but when we finally started doing that, things were going our way. If we could just start out that way, stay at that level of play and then finish strong, we'll come out on top of those closer sets. We just got to find a way to be more consistent."

Although the results may not have favored BBCC Moser is optimistic with the teams resiliency and persistence to compete till the final point is collected. "Something we've struggled with this year is starting out strong in each set, and tonight was another example of that. Set 1 it didn't even feel like we were checked in. We're sending easy balls over the net just for NIC to come out swinging at us. And the start of set 2 looked similar, which in turn was going to make a short night for us. But even though we started down 7-1, and at 20-10, it wasn't looking good for us, the heart and fight of these girls was never questioned. They absolutely battled back in the second set. We flipped a switch and the girls elevated their level of play and started competing with NIC. To come back from being down 20-10 and lose 25-23 speaks volumes of the team as whole. To not give up in that situation, shows how much they fight until the very end. On set point for NIC, we scored 5 points in a row, that is competitive volleyball. That carried some momentum into the third set for us and we finally came out strong. We were in complete control in the third set, had the lead but just couldn't stay up. We let NIC go on a run in the middle stretch of that set, let them go up 20-15 and that's hard to come back from. But once again the grit of these girls proved that we can hang with talented teams like NIC. To come back and lose 25-22, that's the mental toughness I want to see from these girls."

Frustrated with the loss, the show goes on. BBCC makes the long trip to Ontario, Oregon to battle it out versus the Chukars of Treasure Valley Community College on Friday September 29th.

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