BOXSCORE: NC-Denver

DENVER -- Northern Colorado’s women’s volleyball team stepped out of Big Sky Conference play Tuesday night -- and into a hornet’s nest.

The Bears, fresh off earning a conference road split last weekend against Montana and Montana State, couldn’t hold off the Denver Pioneers and their raucous home crowd at Hamilton Gymnasium and fell 3-2 (25-22, 25-21, 23-25, 24-26, 11-15).

Northern Colorado (7-3, 1-1 Big Sky Conference) stormed out of the gate, winning the first two matches, but Denver (11-2) responded in time to the late-arriving crowd and won out for the victory.

The Bears will now regroup and get ready for their Big Sky home opener against Sacramento State on Saturday, Sept. 27.

“We knew coming in it was going to be a long, hard match,” Northern Colorado coach Lyndsey Benson said. “Denver is a good team, and we knew we were going to have to battle if we wanted to win.

“Our level increased as the match went on, which I thought was really good. We played at a higher level as the night progressed, but so did they. Give Denver credit. It wasn’t that we lost the match, though. It’s that they made plays at the end.”

With the amount of points scored in the match, the two teams finished with chock-full stat sheets. Crooked numbers are everywhere you look on the Bears’ side of the docket.

Junior Kenzie Shreeve, continuing her breakout third season at Northern Colorado, had a season high and career-high tying 25 kills in the loss. That, paired with her 10 digs, gave her a team-leading fourth double-double of the season.

And senior Lauren Carter turned in arguably the best match of her season with 52 assists, nine digs and five kills. She also hit at a .556 clip.

“We had some great individual performances tonight,” Benson said. “Lauren set her best match of the season -- and maybe of her career. She distributed it well, got us in good positions and was a great leader throughout.

“And Kenzie … she was just unstoppable at times. She was a force the whole match.”

Junior Breanna VanDerMost finished with 18 digs in the match and ran her streak of 10-plus dig-matches to 10. She was also just one of four Bears in this match, including Shreeve, to reach double figures in the category. Sophomore Jaclyn Bruns scooped up 11 attack attempts and freshman Amanda Arterbun had 10.

In the end, though, a good Denver team was too much to handle.

“We just made some mistakes at key times,” Benson said. “But we’ll learn from this match and know that we are capable of beating a really good team. We’ll use lessons learned tonight throughout the next couple weeks.”