After rolling to their first conference win in over a year and a half on Friday at Murray State, SIU went into Nashville on Saturday night hoping to keep that confidence rolling. They did just that with a five-set win against the Bruins.

A monster performance by senior led the dawgs Nataly Garcia, who led the team in kills with 25 and 26.5 points tallied. Holding the defense together were freshmen Claudia Bobb and Ceci Bulmahn. Bobb led in digs with 17 with Bulmahn not far behind at 15. Assisting them was sophomore setter Anna Jaworski, who tallied 59 total assists.

At first, the Dawgs were riding high coming off the win Friday, getting out to an 8-5 lead quickly in set one. A short Belmont run tied it at 8-8 again, but SIU would go on a massive 14-4 run, taking advantage of everything Belmont threw. The Salukis would come up with a few errors that gave the Bruins some momentum, but it was too little too late as SIU would go up 1-0 quickly.

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Set two didn’t start off the same way for SIU, as Belmont took five out of the first six points of the set. They went up 7-4 quickly, but a couple of kills by Garcia inched SIU back into the lead at 12-9. Some attack errors for SIU kept things close for the Bruins. They would retake the lead at 16-15 after an error by Bulmahn and some great kills got them to lead 20-18.

Garcia took things into her own hands as she took the next four Saluki kills. SIU would hang on by a thread late and a bad set by the Bruins sealed the 26-24 set two win for the Salukis.

With a chance to sweep Belmont, SIU earned themselves all the way to the match point at 26-25 in set three, but with some timely kills by Belmont and a Saluki error, the Bruins stayed alive for set four, only to handily send it again to the fifth set with a 25-19 score.

Everything was going right for the Salukis in set five. Needing only 15 points this time, SIU quickly went up to an 11-3 lead after some aces went SIU’s way. The two teams traded some points for a while, but ultimately SIU sealed the match with a kill by Garcia to win their second conference match in a row and earn their first back-to-back MVC wins since the 2019 season.

The Salukis will look to make it three conference wins in a row when they come back to Davies gym to face Drake on Friday, September 30th. That game will start at 6 p.m.

Sports editor Joseph Bernard can be reached at [email protected] or on twitter @Jojobernard2001. 

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