Rainbow Wahine fight through inconsistency

The goal was to play “up” consistently, not have the constant up-down, up-down, up-down that has been the bane of this volleyball season.

While the consistency was hardly ideal, Hawaii played “up” long enough on Saturday to pull out a 25-20, 25-22, 19-25, 25-17 Big West victory over UC Santa Barbara. Just as the Rainbow Wahine (16-7, 10-2) rebounded from Friday’s gut-wrenching five-set loss at No. 23 Cal Poly, junior hitter McKenna Granato rebounded from her near-.000 hitting from the previous night with a season-high .436, putting down 21 kills over the 2 hours and 9 minutes in Rob Gym.

Granato added 17 digs for her 10th double-double and had half of the team’s six aces. Senior middle Emily Maglio finished with 13 kills and senior libero Savanah Kahakai had 24 of Hawaii’s 77 digs for her 13th consecutive match in double digits.

Hawaii had not lost at UCSB since 1993 and, given the disappointing result from up the coast some 18 hours earlier, it might have been easy for the Wahine to be caught in what many considered a “trap” game. Instead, “we wanted to stick together, knew we had to win if we had a chance to make the postseason,” Granato said in a telephone call. “I’ve been struggling with my timing for the past few weeks. It was better tonight, but I still need to work on it.”

Something Hawaii will need to work on as it heads into its final home matches next week is serve-receive. The Wahine gave up a season-high 14 aces to the Gauchos (6-17, 5-5), seven coming in the final two sets.

Junior setter Annie Hasselmann had six of the aces, including two consecutive in Set 4 as UCSB cut Hawaii’s 21-11 lead to 21-16. The Wahine had led by as much as 18-5 in the final set before the Gauchos — swept in Honolulu on Oct. 6 — made a run at pushing it to five.

“My thought was, ‘one pass, we just need one pass’ during the runs they had, ” Granato said. “It was one pass at a time.”

Coming out of a timeout at 21-16, Hawaii scored three straight to gain match point. Sophomore hitter Chloe Allen — who had just one kill against the Wahine three weeks ago — delayed it with her 16th kill, but Granato answered with her 21st to end it.

The Gauchos again were led by sophomore hitter Lindsey Ruddins, who finished with 23 kills and a team-high 16 digs. It was the fifth straight match with 20-plus kills for the reigning AVCA national player of the week.

“One of our goals for the night was to get them out of system as much as possible, so we knew we were going to be really aggressive on the serve,” UCSB coach Nicole Lantagne Welch said in a press release. “We have a lot of good servers on this team, and a bunch of them were able to get in a groove tonight.”

Hawaii coach Robyn Ah Mow-Santos was pleased with the victory but little else. While the Wahine did cut down their service errors (6), giving up 14 aces to the opponent was not acceptable.

“It was ugly volleyball, we played ugly volleyball,” she said in a telephone call. “I don’t even know what to say anymore. Even after telling them that we’re probably not going to win the Big West but maybe if we win out, win out 3-0 (in sweeps), maybe someone might give us something for the postseason. But in order for the NCAA to see we deserve it, we can’t be playing like this.

“In our locker room before the game, Nick (volunteer assistant Costello) told them this was the match to show your character. After not coming out with a ‘W’ Friday after playing so hard, what kind of character does this team have? It could be ‘woe is me’ or ‘let’s take care of business.’ That was good from Nick. We won, yes, but after all the up-down, up-down, when are we going to play the volleyball I know we can play?”

Hawaii’s next chance is next week with its final two home matches. The Wahine host Cal State Northridge on Friday and Long Beach State on Saturday, both matches starting at 7 p .m. Saturday’s match is senior night for Maglio, Kahakai, Clare-Marie Anderson, Kalei Greeley, Gianna Guinasso and Kendra Koelsch.