CONFERENCE READY

Saturday, September 4

Irvine, CA

9:00 AM

California Baptist University

Montana Tech

9/4/2010 11:18:00 PM | Women's Volleyball

IRVINE, Calif. --- It was more of the same for No. 3-ranked California Baptist University as the team swept two more non-conference opponents at the Asics Crowne Plaza Labor Day Tournament.

“I'm happy with the way the girls looked early in the season, but now the real test starts as we move to GSAC play,” said Head Coach Ryan McGuyre. “We can kind of get a feel for what we are working with as a team in these early season tournaments and get ready for some tough matches coming up”

CBU defeated Montana Tech 3-0 (25-16, 25-20, 25-16) and Great Falls (Mont.) 3-0 (25-19, 25-15, 25-19) to close out the third tournament sweep of the season. For the second straight day the Lancers held one opponent below .100 on the attack and hit .398 in another match.

Montana Tech became the sixth opponent of the season to hit below .100, with an attack percentage of just .055 in the opener. The Lancers dug 47 of Montana's 91 attack attempts and served eight aces to continually keep the Diggers off balance. Montana had only 21 kills as opposed to 16 errors in the match.

The opening set looked as though it was shaping up to be a close match when the two teams played to a 14-14 tie early in the game. Jessica Kalama scored an emphatic kill and Linjun Ji served an ace to force a Digger timeout. Coming out of the timeout the Lancers scored two more quick points and never looked back.

CBU used a seven point run to take charge of the second set and closed out the third with a six point run to put an exclamation point on the match.

The Lancers opened the tournament Friday hitting .398 against Jamestown and finished with the exact same offensive number against Great Falls in Saturday's closing game. CBU ripped 46 kills on 88 attempts with only 11 errors in the match.

The Argos opened the match with a 5-2 lead, but the Lancers quickly battled back and after several lead changes took a 17-16 lead. From there CBU outscored Great Falls 8-3 to win the opening set. After dominating the second game the Lancers jumped out to an 11-4 lead in the third. The Argos battled back led by Taylor Lucero to draw to within three, 21-18. A kill by Jelena Dragovic and an error on the Argos swung the momentum back to the Lancers and Jessica Roberts finished things off with two straight kills to win the match.

“I thought Ji was our most consistent player this weekend and now that we got Nevena into the mix we know we have two quality setters,” said McGuyre.

The Lancers had six players hit better than .500 and Nevena Dragovic dished out 37 assists in the match. In her first four matches as a Lancer Nevena Dragovic recorded 132 assists at a rate of 12 per set.

As a team the Lancers hit .326 for the tournament and held opponents to just a .088 attack percentage. CBU averaged 14.53 attacks per set for the tournament, up from their season average of 13.95 a/s. Ji scored 30 kills on the weekend and is one of five Lancers with better than 70 kills on the season. Kalama leads CBU with 100 kills on the year.

“I told the girls we go back to 0-0 now,” said McGuyre. “We have two big matches this coming week and really every week from here on out.”

The Lancers begin conference play Tuesday at home against Westmont and then welcome Azusa Pacific into the Van Dyne Gym Thursday. Both games are at 7 p.m. and will be available for viewing on cbulancers.com.