In one of the "most complete" matches The Master's men's volleyball team has played this season, the Mustangs defeated the Benedictine Mesa Redhawks 25-14, 25-14, 25-12 Saturday in The MacArthur Center.
TMU (16-0, 9-0) hit .506 as a team while limiting the Redhawks to just .030. The Mustangs nearly tripled BenU's number of kills (46-18), committed just six hitting errors to 16 for Benedictine Mesa, and out-served them with a 6-0 advantage in service aces.
For Head Coach
Jared Goldberg, getting off to a fast start was going to be critical in order to beat the conference No. 3 team.
"There's been matches throughout the year where we've started well and not finished, or not started well and finished well," Goldberg said. "(The match against Benedictine Mesa Saturday) was a lot closer to the most complete match that we have played (this year). There wasn't the ups and downs. We talked about it yesterday after our match against Park-Gilbert. The level of consistency that we need to have, especially as the year is coming towards the end as we only have about a month left of the season. So we are just trying to clean it up and play a little more consistent. We know our top end is very high, but we also recognize that our bottom end can be pretty low too."
Master's started by jumping out to a 5-1 lead that increased to 16-8 by the midpoint of the first set. Two kills by
Garrett Beall, along with kills from
Isaac Seltzer and
Trace Oswald, closed out the set with the 11-point win.
TMU hit .739 in that first set, with 18 kills landing off 23 total attacks and only one hitting error.
The second set was practically a carbon copy of the first, with the Mustangs again jumping out to an early lead and building on it as the set progressed. A 3-1 lead built to a 10-4 advantage that increased to 18-11. The set ended with Master's getting seven of the last nine points.
As good as the hitting was in the first set for the Mustangs, the third set had great defense. The Redhawks could only get three kills and hit -.231 in that final set, while TMU got 13 kills on 19 attacks and hit .579 to win it by 13.
Oswald led Master's with 14 kills in 19 attempts. He committed no hitting errors, giving him a .737 percentage for the game. Seltzer had 13 kills and only two errors, with
Matthew Hamm dishing 39 assists. Both Beall and Seltzer were each part of three blocks.
TMU is now hitting .404 as a team on the year, which is No. 1 in the nation and 35 points ahead of Park (MO) the number two team.
The Master's will have their final home match of the season on Tuesday when they host Hope International in The MacArthur Center. It will be Senior Night with five seniors expected to be celebrated. Game time is scheduled for 6 p.m.
