FORT COLLINS — Coming into to Moby Arena isn’t really a picnic for visiting teams.
Of course you have to play Colorado State — which is ranked seemingly every year — but there’s the crowd noise and the Rams feed off of that energy. Now imagine being a young team facing those conditions.
It’s a recipe for a bad day.
The Rams swept Fresno State comfortably 25-15, 25-7, 25-17 for their 13th straight victory, the sixth longest stretch in program history, and it started early and up front for CSU (18-1, 6-0 Mountain West).
“Fresno State is very young, their head coach isn’t traveling, and so they’re kind of out of sorts. They hit a lot of unforced errors, but a lot of it is we blocked exceptionally well,” CSU coach Tom Hilbert said. “We didn’t just block, we stuffed balls and that intimidates people and causes them to do things they don’t want to do.”
The Rams were bullies at the net tallying 11.5 blocks with eight different players picking up at least one assisted block in the match. Senior Kelsey Snider recorded seven assisted blocks to go along with seven kills on 13 attempts (.538).
Eventually the domination at the net seeped its way into the Bulldogs’ heads, who needed a late rally in the third set to avoid hitting in the negative, climbing back to an even 25 kills and 25 errors. Fresno hit -.125 in set 1 and -.148 in the second.
CSU hauled in plenty of free points and the players weren’t complaining.
“It makes it easy,” outside hitter Dri Culbert said with laugh.
Fresno’s .000 hitting percentage is the lowest the Rams held an opponent to since October 2012.
It became obviously early on that Fresno State wasn’t ready for the level of competition the Rams brought, and like any good predator, they pounced on the Bulldogs’ shaky play.
Culbert scored a team-best 10 kills (.625) and seven Rams registered multiple kills, five of them hitting .300 or better.
“Even though they are a really young team, everyone can play their best at any point and so I think we went in just knowing what we could do on our side and run our offense the way we run it,” Culbert said. “That was a key part of it I think, focusing on our side of the court more than theirs.”
Hilbert noted how much Saturday’s match differed than his team’s last time out against Wyoming, where CSU needed 20 kills just to win the third set alone. He’s fine with the other team handing out points, but there’s more to gain in the long run in close matches.
“I don’t want to say this is not valuable, it always is, but every match takes on a different character,” he said. “And this one was about us trying to play cleanly and not make a lot of mistakes.”
Mission accomplished. The Rams only had five errors in 77 total attacks to hit .429 as a team.
However, every team in the MW is gunning for CSU and Oct. 16 at New Mexico (7 p.m.) — with one of the league’s best in senior Chantale Riddle — will give Hilbert exactly the challenge he’s looking for.
“This has been kind of tradition; we have a big target on our backs in conference,” libero Jaime Colaizzi said. “I think that we take pride in that and it kind of fuels our fire.”
Contact Reporter-Herald Sports Writer Cris Tiller at 970-669-5050 ext. 511, tillerc@reporter-herald.com or twitter.com/cristiller
