Cardinals brush aside No. 1 CSI

They didn’t “Pack the House,” as North Idaho College officials had hoped.

But the 1,000 or so volleyball fans that did show up at Christianson Gym on Saturday were certainly in no hurry to leave.

Not after watching NIC stun No. 1-ranked College of Southern Idaho 3-2 in a Scenic West Athletic Conference match for the ages.

“Is this sweet or what?” Cardinals athletic director Al Williams shouted while getting a hug from one of the many well-wishers who stayed long after the match to revel in the brilliance of NIC’s gripping 30-26, 26-30, 31-29, 30-18, 17-15 triumph.

The upset win, which took nearly 3 hours to complete, was the fifth straight for the fifth-ranked Cards (27-4 overall, 7-1 in the SWAC) and moved them into a first-place tie with CSI (40-2, 7-1) atop the conference standings.

“When we were down at CSI, we really took a beating from them,” Cardinals coach Bret Taylor recalled. “So to come back and do this at our place, in five games, shows what kind of character our kids have.”

Going in, there was little – other than its lofty NCJAA ranking – to suggest NIC had a chance in this one. In two previous matches against the Golden Eagles, the Cardinals had failed to win a single game, losing by the lopsided scores of 30-16, 30-19 in CSI’s early-season tournament and 30-15, 30-18, 30-13 in a SWAC showdown, also in Twin Falls.

But the Cards looked every bit the equal of the Eagles on this day, hitting .367 to CSI’s .347.

Cintia Alessi led NIC with 16 kills and eight digs, while Melissa Merchant added 11 kills, assisted on nine of the Cardinals’ 21 blocks and hit .409. Sarah Johnston finished with eight kills and a hitting percentage of .727 on her 11 attacks.

“Merchant was awesome,” Taylor said of his 6-foot-2 sophomore middle blocker from Oalkey, Calif. “She’s come a long way from last year to this year. She’s been working really hard, and you could tell.”

Merchant called the win “amazing, amazing, amazing,” but added that she and her teammates were confident they could pull off the upset.

“When we were down at CSI, we didn’t play bad,” she said. “The score didn’t reflect how good we played. So we just prepared as much as we could for the rematch and got mentally into it.

“I was ready to play it this morning. I woke up, got my music on and was ready to go. We watched tape, saw their errors, saw what was open and took advantage of it. I thought they were a very beatable team last year. We just didn’t have the right components. But this year our team is amazing, and we put it all together today.”

NIC looked a bit shaky at the start of the match as JoAnna Kaczor, the Golden Eagles’ 6-4 freshman outside hitter from Wroclaw, Poland, registered seven early kills to give her team a 7-4 lead in the opening game.

But the Cardinals eventually figured out a blocking scheme to slow down the SWAC’s kill leader.

“We knew that she was going to get her kills during the match,” Taylor said of Kaczor, who came in averaging 4.52 per game and finished with 32 more after hitting .481, “and that if we could just slow things down a bit, we’d have a better chance of getting to some of her balls.”

After losing the fourth game by 12 points, NIC jumped to an early 7-4 lead in the fifth and eventually won it after an 18-minute delay to allow officials to care for CSI setter Kaylene Finau, who apparently hyperextended her right knee while making an unsuccessful block attempt on a kill by Alessi that put the Cards up 15-14.

Finau was fitted with an inflatable cast and carried off the floor. She was taken to Kootenai Medical Center for X-rays, and CSI coach Ben Stroud went there immediately after the match to be with her.

Finau’s injury silenced the crowd, but only momentarily.

When the Cardinals scored back-to-back points on a net violation and hitting error by CSI, the celebration started.

“They were very well prepared for us last time,” Taylor said of the Golden Eagles, who only previous loss had come against Southwest Missouri back on Sept. 2 during a tournament in Salt Lake City. “But this time, we took a lot more time to prepare for them.

“And when you have about a thousand people in the stands who are on your side, it makes a difference, too. Playing at home is always a good thing.”