Almost a year ago to date, Northern Colorado came into Moby Arena and left with a win after dominating Colorado State 3-1 (25-10, 25-13, 23-25, 25-22).
“End game: We’re going to develop our offense to be a little bit more balanced.” -Emily Kohan CSU volleyball head coach
As the Rams looked to return the favor tonight, they fell short. The Rams struggled with little errors that cost them points. This would ultimately lead to their 3-2 (22-25, 25-17, 25-19, 23-25, 11-15) defeat.
“I think we are happy to have a couple days of practice here to work some of that stuff out because we haven’t had time to work out even from Stanford some of the things we had,” head coach Emily Kohan said.
Some of those struggles that Kohan mentioned are the offense for the Rams. In their upset against Kentucky, they hit at a rate of .346, tonight that number was .282.
“End game: We’re going to develop our offense to be a little bit more balanced,” Kohan said.
Part of getting the offense more balanced comes from the setter Emery Herman. Herman has had a good start to the season but struggled to get the ball where it needed to be for the attackers.
Struggles are expected for Herman, as she needs time to build chemistry with her teammates. Kohan pulled her aside after the first set and gave her some words of advice.
“Just to locate balls and do what she needed to do best and situationally how to use different people and make better decisions,” Kohan said. “And I know she did a better job, and again, we needed to pass and be able to get our middles a little bit more involved.”
It was up and down for all of the Rams tonight. They struggled with service errors in key moments, return errors and mistakes when passing the ball.
After an ugly loss in the first set, the Rams turned it around dominantly winning the next two. However, UNC was able to push it to a best-of-15 final round.
The final set was a mirror of the rest of the game. A back-and-forth between the two teams, that UNC would end up taking the win. Despite CSU winning on almost every single facet of the box score, they couldn’t get it done in the end.
CSU will now look to its next string of match ups on the road to bounce back and regain momentum as they look to get back above .500.
CSU will play their next three games in Arkansas from Sept. 1-3. Two in Fayetteville and one in Conway. Their first game comes against No. 25 ranked Arkansas, then they will play Michigan and Central Arkansas after that.
Reach Damon Cook at sports@collegian.com or on Twitter @dwcook2001.
