The Hawaii volleyball team could not overcome self-inflicted mistakes in a perplexing 25-22, 25-20, 25-17 loss to Ball State last night.

A Stan Sheriff Center crowd of 1,801 was stunned into silence as the 15th-ranked Cardinals, who had never won in eight previous matches in Hawaii, outplayed the No. 5 Warriors in nearly every phase in the first round of the three-night Outrigger Invitational.

Opening-match jitters? Trying too hard? Out of sync?

"All of the above," said Charlie Wade, UH’s second-year head coach.

For the first time during his tenure, Wade ordered the team to the locker room after aloha ball, forgoing the usual postmatch lei and candy presentations. Five minutes later, Wade emerged from the locker, in disbelief as he scanned the final statistics.

"I had not seen that in the year and a half," Wade said. "We had 31 errors in three games."

Ten were Ball State blocks. The rest were shots out of bounds, into the net or against the antennae.

"We pressed a little bit too hard," said UH left-side hitter Joshua Walker, who had more errors (10) than kills (eight) in 26 swings. "We tried to do a little too much with our swings. We got out of system with what we were doing."

The Warriors’ trifecta of corner hitters — Walker, left-side hitter Steven Hunt and opposite attacker Jonas Umlauft — combined for 24 hitting errors.

"One, maybe we were a little rusty," Wade said. "We hadn’t played yet. Two, maybe we pressed a little bit. There was a lot of anticipation."

Wade said the "sets were OK," and the "passing was all right." The Warriors passed 63 serves without an error.

"We just hit a bunch of balls out of bounds," Wade said.

UH setter Nejc Zemljak said: "We’ll have to look at some video and figure it out. Obviously, we came with a lot of will. We were hungry. But maybe we were over-hungry."

During the offseason, the Warriors rebuilt their defense, finding successors to libero Ric Cervantes and middle blockers Matt Rawson and Steven Grgas. Brennon Dyer, a senior utilityman, and freshman Shane Welch started in the middle last night; Nick Castello, a transfer, was the libero.

But the Warriors did not serve tough enough to help their defense.

They scored points on only 17 of their 60 serves, and struggled to string together streaks. They went through 12 rotation turns in the third set, 14 in the second set.

In the meantime, the Cardinals dominated at the net, and used tough serves to keep the Warriors out of rhythm.

"We took advantage of that, and tried to put the pressure on their side of the net," Ball State coach Joel Walton said.

Greg Herceg led the Cardinals with 10 kills. Anders Nelson, a 6-foot-9 middle, contributed eight kills against no errors in 12 swings, and got his handprints on nine of the Cardinals’ blocks.

Nelson said the Cardinals worked extensively on compensating if they were late on a block.

"That helped a lot," Nelson said. "I tried to get my hands on as many (shots) as I could."

And the Cardinals’ two freshmen — setter Graham McIlvaine, who won a three-player battle for the starting job, and libero Tommy Rouse — provided scrappy defense. Each had seven digs.

The Warriors had intended to unveil a quicker offense, but it was the Cardinals who played fast — scrambling to keep alive the Warriors’ best spikes and rapidly assembling double blocks at the pins.

"We tried to do a little too much with the ball," Walker said. "We either hit it too hard or we didn’t see where the block really was."

The Warriors face Penn State tonight at 7. UCLA and Ball State meet at 4 p.m.

"It’s a long year," Wade said. "Certainly, there’s no reason for us to panic at this point. We know we have good outside hitters.".

In the first match, No. 8 UCLA surged to a 23-25, 25-19, 25-22 25-18 victory over No. 10 Penn State.

Middle blocker Thomas Amberg slammed a team-high 12 kills (against one error) in 19 swings, and outside hitter Gonzalo Quiroga contributed 11 kills.