CHARLOTTE – The UTEP volleyball team closed out the weekend with a 3-0 (29-27, 25-23, 25-19) sweep over Charlotte Sunday afternoon in Halton Arena.
The Miners improve to 13-9 (7-2 Conference USA) while Charlotte drops to 8-13 (2-7 C-USA).
Two Miners hit double-digit kills, Alianza Darley (11) and Serena Patterson (10). Mattie Gantt (25) and Hande Yetis (13) combined to put up 38 assists for the team and Hula Crisostomo and Sara Pustahija tallied nine digs each.
UTEP's all-around performance held the statistical advantage in kills (46-35), blocks (6.5-5), hitting percentage (.320 - .216), and service aces (9-2).
"I am excited to get back home with a sweep all the way across the country," head coach Ben Wallis said. "It's exciting to see that we're sweeping teams and winning sets and still not playing as well as we're capable of."
SET ONE | The opening set consisted of 15 tied scores, seven lead changes and five set points where both teams went on small scoring runs to regain the lead. At 13 even, a kill by Kaya Weaver broke the tie and sent the Miners on a 6-3 run just before Charlotte took its first timeout at 19-16. After the break, Charlotte drove a 5-1 spurt of their own to grab the lead at 21-20 and forced UTEP to sidebar. Charlotte approached set point, 24-23, but a kill by Alianza Darley and an ace by Hula Crisostomo flipped the set back to the Miners, 25-24. The teams went back-and-forth scoring by two, and a Charlotte error and kill by Patterson closed the set win for the Miners, 29-27.
SET TWO | Similar to the first set, the teams kept the pressure on in the second set. With UTEP ahead 16-14, a kill by Charlotte's Emani' Foster kick started a 6-0 run for a 20-16 advantage. With UTEP trailing 23-20, the Miners ran off the next five points to steal the set win, 25-23.
SET THREE | For the first time in the match, UTEP won the opening point in set three. Charlotte had an early 8-6 lead, but a kill by Darley sparked a 5-0 run securing the final lead of the set, 11-8. Charlotte closed the deficit within two, 18-16, but the Miners held their opponent to three for the remainder of the set. UTEP wiped the floor with five ore kills to complete the sweep, 25-19.
Final Thoughts from Coach Wallis
"It's really hard on our team to go mid-week matches and fly from the Mountain time zone to Eastern time zone. It's a really tough turnaround for our team since we played on Friday in El Paso; it would've been really easy for us to make excuses, find reasons why we couldn't win and why we couldn't play well. But we're playing pretty well offensively right now and at times we're serving the ball really tough, however, we're still just a little bit discombobulated and we have so much room for improvement. So I'm excited to get back in the gym this week and fine tune some things and prepare for a tough UNT team on the road, as well as a really tough Rice team on the road- pretty excited and fired up about our team offensively. This week we put up some big numbers kill wise, and our setters were really good in two back-to-back matches. I think that we're showing some improvement on the right and being able to get a lot more offense out of our rights, which is going to help us against the best teams we see down the end of the down the end of the conference, the second half of conference, we're going to need six attackers to able to score, which is what we did this week. For Tori Price to take 14 swings this week and had one error on those 14 swings and had 13 kills, that's crazy. So that's just good efficiency. But also, it's nice for those guys to see us put a lot of time and energy into doing things right in the gym and then it pays off for them."
UP NEXT
The Miners will head to east Texas to take on UNT on Friday (Oct. 28) and Rice on Sunday (Oct. 30).
For complete coverage of UTEP Women's Volleyball, be sure to follow the Miners on social media at @utepvb (Instagram) @UTEPVolleyball (Facebook) and @UTEPVB (Twitter) or visit the official home of UTEP Athletics at UTEPMiners.com.
