Duluth, Minn. - The #6 UMD volleyball team might have been wearing special pink jerseys as part of Dig Pink Night on Friday, but in terms of their play, they were red-hot. The Bulldogs swept Winona State 3-0 in their return to Romano to improve to 17-1 on the season and 9-1 in conference play. 

It took little time for the Bulldogs to establish a pace in the first set that would hold for much of the entire match. In no time at all, the score was 4-0 UMD. A blink or two after that, the score was 8-2 Bulldogs, and Winona State head coach Joe Getzin was calling his team's first timeout. The closest the Warriors could pull themselves back into the match was to within five at a score of 10-5 UMD- after that, pretty much everything went the Bulldogs' way. Winona State burned their last timeout at a score of 13-5, meaning there wasn't much that could be done when the Bulldogs closed the set on a 12-6 run to take it at a score of 25-11. Syndey Lanoue could do no wrong for the Bulldogs throughout the set and was a major cause for their success here at-large. She racked up seven kills, including five in that 12-6 run alone, on a stellar .700 hitting percentage. She also recorded a service ace. Madison Gordon had a team-high 14 assists topped off by a service ace of her own.

Opponents don't tend to bow down after a single set lost, and Winona was no exception. The Warriors jumped out to a 2-0 lead of their own to start off the second frame. an advantage they would be able to hold until the score was 4-3 and would snag back at a score of 6-5. Once Cianna Selbitschka netted a kill for the Bulldogs to break a tie and make the score 8-7 UMD, everything changed. Including that kill, the Bulldogs went on a 7-1 run to make the score 14-8. A Winona timeout at 12-8 did them no favors. UMD followed this up with a 5-1 run to take a double-digit lead at 19-9, Winona taking their final timeout of the set at 18-9. The Bulldogs closed things out with a 6-2 run to take yet another set at a score of 25-11 and a commanding 2-0 lead in the match. Here, it was Selbitschka's turn to shine offensively. She had five kills on a .667 hitting percentage in this set. Gordon again led the way in assists with 11. Defensively, the Bulldogs racked up 10 total block assists, Hope Schjenken leading the way with three. Schjenken also had a solo block. 

The home fans in Romano would have been wrong to start celebrating just yet. Winona State started the third set looking sharp, never taking the lead but keeping things much tighter than they'd been early in the previous two sets. Around the midway point of the set, the score was only 11-8 UMD. Slowly but surely, though, the Bulldogs started to establish some distance. A five-point lead at a score of 16-11 was enough to draw a timeout out of Winona, and for the first time of the night, the Warriors' efforts out of the break forced UMD to call a timeout of their own at 19-14. Still, the Warriors edged closer and closer to evening the score, at one point down just two at a score of 21-19. Perhaps developing a new sense of urgency, the Bulldogs decided to wait around no longer to close things out. They'd go on a 4-1 run to end the third frame 25-20 and take the match 3-0. Grace Daak and Lanoue tied for the team lead in kills in this final set with four, Daak's coming at a hitting percentage of .500. Gordon had 12 assists in this set. 

At the top of the offensive charts by the end of an impressive victory for the Bulldogs was Lanoue, who had 12 total kills. Gordon had a team-high 37 assists. The Bulldogs pitched in among themselves to tally eight total service aces. The Bulldog defense had a big night in terms of blocks, racking up 14 total across the match. This included 18 total block assists. Perhaps the most important blocker of them all was a familiar name in Lanoue, who was all over the court Friday night. She paired her offensive effort with three solo blocks and two block assists.  

Winona State was led offensively by Taylor Pagel, who ended the night with eight kills. Jaci Winchell had a team-high 24 assists. Rylee Vaughn led the defensive side of things with nine digs, while Pagel also recorded a solo block and two block assists to lead the team. 

A common tone throughout Boos' comments after the match was one of reflection as he looked back on a grueling five-set match against St. Cloud State on Tuesday to help him contextualize his feelings about his team's performance against the Warriors. That matchup against the Huskies was such that it limited what the Bulldogs did in practice leading up to Friday's match. In light of that especially, Boos was happy with the evolution he saw from his team's offense all across the board in this three-day span.

"Against St. Cloud, we had our moments of good serving, but serving was an issue for us- certainly, we missed a ton..." Boos said. "So, I was excited tonight to see how good they were from the service line. I think there's something to be said for the comforts of serving at home, and I think that really helped us dictate the defensive side of the ball. We were making them uncomfortable... From our standpoint offensively, I thought we were really good. Obviously, our sideout percentage was extremely high-that was a bit of a struggle especially in the third and fourth sets at St. Cloud. Excited that we were as efficient as we were offensively."

Credit is still due to the Warriors, who dug in to make things close down the stretch of the third set. Boos spoke to the multi-faceted importance of his team being able to find a way to hold off a late Winona surge, especially at this point in the season. Though it wasn't perfect- which was part of the reason things got interesting to begin with- it was still promising for Boos to see. 

"As much as it's important just from a physical standpoint- you want to get it done when you have a chance to get it done and save up your energy for that next one the next day- I just think it's also part of our maturation process," Boos said. "If you have an opportunity to close the door, you need to close it. You need to do it by controlling the action and doing the things that you're communicating in the scout to do. I got a little bit on them in the late parts of the third set because there were some things we'd talked about doing and weren't executing as well as we needed to, and it was allowing the match to stay a little closer than maybe it had been prior to that. But, still really happy with the fact that we were able to finish it off in three. That's a really good team who was on a nice winning streak, so to get out of here like we did, I'm very happy with the result."