Sports editor Jaralynn Tammi Morellano says UAB gave Tulsa a hard time in the first and fourth.
The University of Tulsa’s volleyball team traveled to Birmingham, Alabama where it faced the University of Alabama at Birmingham in an intense conference-opener. The Golden Hurricane started its American Athletic Conference record 1-0 while its overall record improved 9-4. The Blazers fell 5-7, and it starts its conference performance down 0-1.
“What a Battle with UAB,” Tulsa Head Coach Lauren Ramatowski said. “They are a very good team with a couple of attackers who did a nice job finding kills against us. When our team was able to stay in system off the first touch from a passing and defensive perspective, our offense was able to find kills.”
The first set was suspenseful from the start. Tulsa led early with a 6-4 lead, but UAB was able to squeeze by and take the lead 7-8. This set alone had five ties and two lead changes. The back-and-forth resulted in a seven-point set win (18-25) for UAB. This set saw the best hitting set for UAB, the Blazers hitting 0.387.
The second set continued to keep the audience on edge, the set seeing seven tie scores and three lead exchanges. Middle Blocker Rachel Brown broke the last tie 9-8 with a rough kill down the center of UAB’s defense. This play seemed to jumpstart the Golden Hurricane’s engine, it never letting go of the lead for the rest of the match. It held a lead as high as nine points at 19-10. Middle Blocker Arianna Mongare led the offense with five kills, and setters Brayden Hipp and Brittany Bacorn each had eight assists. Tulsa took the frame 25-16 and tied the match 1-1.
Tulsa went into the third set energized from its last set performance. The Golden Hurricane took an early 7-3 lead, but UAB would stick to it like glue and force a 10-10 tie. Tulsa took the lead after this, and it kept the lead for the remainder of the set. Libero Marta Pecalli had an outstanding performance with eight digs in this set alone.
“Marta was a staple to our defense, she touched a lot of balls and kept us in that match,” said Ramatowski.
With just one set until victory for the Golden Hurricane, UAB would perform tremendously under this pressure. In the fourth set, the Blazers would outperform Tulsa in kills (7-17), and attacked the ball at a 0.375 average as opposed to Tulsa’s 0.070. UAB scored first and never let up the lead to tie the match 2-2 with a 25-11 victory for the fourth set.
In the last set, both teams fought tooth and nail to take the victory, tying six times in a short amount of time. Late in the set, both teams were tied 9-9. From there, the Golden Hurricane would trump the Blazers and outscore it 6-1 to steal the final set 15-10. This final set gave Tulsa the win 3-2.
Following this, the Blazers continued its conference play and challenged Memphis at the Tiger’s home turf on Sunday. The Golden Hurricane returned home and hosted Temple at the Donald W. Reynolds on Sunday.
