Box Score NAMPA, Idaho – The Northwest Nazarene volleyball team learned a valuable lesson Saturday.

There are no easy matches in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference.

The Nighthawks lost 25-22, 26-24, 29-31, 25-11 to Seattle Pacific at the Johnson Sports Center.

After their opening conference road trip at Western Washington and Simon Fraser where they nearly upset both teams, the Nighthawks needed four sets to defeat winless Saint Martin's and then struggled against a Seattle Pacific team that was winless in conference play.

"Part of that is us growing and learning and that we have to be mentally prepared and mentally focused to be able to go through it," NNU coach Doug English said. "If we do those things, we have a chance to win every match."

The Nighthawks (5-6 overall, 1-3 GNAC) certainly had some chances Saturday.

After dropping the opening set, NNU led 23-22 but couldn't finish off the Falcons and ended up in a two-set hole.

"The first set, we were making lots of errors and we were trying to correct that," English said. "I think we got out of that by the end of the match, but by that time we had already lost one set and then were down 0-2 and it's really hard to come back from 0-2."

The Nighthawks won the third set in a wild back-and-forth, eventually grabbing the victory at 31 points. In the fourth set, SPU jumped out to a 16-6 lead before the Nighthawks pulled within 16-10. The Falcons (4-8, 1-3) closed on a 9-1 run to win the match.

"Our middles played a really good match," English said. "Lexi (Ward) and Tayler (Markland) played really, really well and we tried to ride them as best we could. By Set 4, SPU kind of caught on to that and Tayler got blocked a few times.

"We know we are going to be in every match that we play, but we need to do little things here and there to help us win the match."

NNU heads to Alaska next weekend.

Ward finished with eight kills and a .412 hitting percentage, while Markland had nine kills and hit .227.

Brooke Foster added 14 kills and 13 digs, Abbey Blum had 10 kills and 16 digs, Caroline McMahon had 21 digs, Kayla Sale had 15 digs and five assists and Megan Nelson had 41 assists and 20 digs. Mattisyn Cope had six kills in her first extended action of the season.
 
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