BILLINGS, Mont. – For its lone Great Northwest Athletic Conference game of the week, the Montana State University Billings women's volleyball team heads to Seattle Pacific this Saturday at 3 p.m. MT.
 
MSUB's penultimate road trip of the regular-season comes after the team got its first two road wins of the season against Rocky Mountain College and Western Oregon last week. Yet two of the team's preseason goals are still in play: finishing with a winning record and breaking into the top half of the conference standings.
 
"We still have the opportunity to finish what we set out to do at the beginning of the season: finish at .500 or above, and finishing in the top half of the GNAC," MSUB head coach Casey Williams said. "We're making sure we're all on the same page and working towards the same goal; it's not individualized at this point. We're still working as a team and we still have very realistic goals that we can achieve at the end of the season."
 
With five games to go, the Yellowjackets (10-13, 5-8 GNAC) find themselves ranked seventh in the conference, 2.5 games back from Alaska and three games behind Seattle Pacific. A win on Saturday is not out of the cards, as SPU handed 3-17 Western Oregon its first GNAC win last week.
 
LAST TIME OUT
MSUB was riding a four-game home win-streak the last time the two teams met, nearly hung around in the last two sets but eventually fell 3-0 (21-25, 24-26, 20-25) at home on Oct. 9.
 
"I think changing up our defense is going to be important," Williams said of the rematch. "I feel like we were on defense more than we were on the attack throughout our first match. I think SPU exposed a few weak spots within our defense and they did a really good job with their overhead ball-control in order to emphasize some of those open holes."
 
Offensively, Skylar Reed sparked MSUB's comeback attempts in the second and third sets. During the second set, Reed pulled the 'Jackets back into things by giving MSUB a 23-22 lead, then tying the set at 24-all. Then in the third, Reed helped MSUB charge out to a 9-8 lead en route to having seven kills in the final frame alone. She would finish with a team-high 14 kills.
 
"Skylar did really well the last time we played SPU," Williams said. "But it'll take more than one player to be a sparkplug this time. Making sure we're more balanced as a team is going to be big for us."
 
Williams cited both the emerging offensive play of sophomore middle blocker Hannah Hayden, plus the improvement of outside hitters Zoe Bibb and Jahsita Fa'ali'i as a few of the ways in which MSUB has improved since first playing Seattle Pacific.
 
"Our outsides as a core group have been continually improving and being more consistent," Williams said. "Zoe and Jahsita Fa'ali'i have been sharing the position over the last few matches. Zoe's a little sparkplug; she's so fun to watch. She's always giving 100% out there. Jahsita is pretty crafty. If we were able to put them both into one player, we'd have the best outside in the world, but they both bring something unique and different to the team."
 
ABOUT LAST WEEK
The 'Jackets had their busiest road trip since playing in Chaminade's Hawai'i Challenge back in September, playing at Rocky Mountain College, Saint Martin's and Western Oregon in the span of five days.
 
First, MSUB grinding out a three-set win over Rocky Mountain College, giving the Yellowjackets their first straight-sets series sweep of their in-city rivals since 2004.
 
From there, MSUB's quick turnaround at Saint Martin's didn't go as planned. The Saints, who were on the wrong end of a sweep the last time the teams played, took the first set 25-19, but MSUB flipped the script in the second thanks to several young players stepping up.
 
A week after setting her single-game career high in kills against Alaska, second-year freshman Zoe Bibb tracked down freshman setter Briel Norman's passes and gave the 'Jackets a spark on the outside.
 
"It's a blessing to have that opportunity to get out on the court and help out the team," Bibb said. "You can only do so much on the bench, and then when you get to go out on the court and swing and get some good points on the board for the team and really contribute – that really makes you feel good after putting in all that hard work."
 
Trailing 9-12 midway through the second set, Bibb checked in and got on the board with a kill that helped MSUB stay within three points. Shortly thereafter, Bibb and Joelle Mahowald's block kicked off an 8-0 run – including back-to-back kills from Bibb – that gave MSUB an 18-15 lead. All told, Bibb finished with five kills in the second set alone.
 
"I felt like I finally belonged there," Bibb said. "I felt like when I got thrown in there, I wasn't scrambling – it wasn't me not knowing if I was deserving to be out there. But I felt good out on the court. I felt confident."
 
Although MSUB would fall short against Saint Martin's, both Bibb and Norman had career-highs of 10 kills and 20 assists, respectively. Both Bibb and Williams lauded Norman for coming in off the bench and running the offense without missing a beat.
 
"When Briel came in, she totally changed the dynamic of the game," Bibb said. "It was great. It was really cool playing with her because she gave me every chance I could get."
 
Williams believes the most important part about the road trip, however, was how the team rebounded after the Saint Martin's game to beat Western Oregon 3-1.
 
Although things could have gotten out of hand after dropping the first set to Western Oregon last Saturday, MSUB kicked things into overdrive in sets two through four. Bayli Monck had a monster, 21-kill, 16-dig double-double – including 10 kills in the fourth set alone. As a team, eight different MSUB players record kills and the team hit .264, which is the team's third-best mark of the season.
 
STAT CORNER

• Still cementing herself as one of the best players in program history, Bayli Monck broke into the program's top-10 career digs list in the final set of the Western Oregon game last Saturday with her 976^th dig.
• Monck is 24 digs away from becoming one of five players in MSUB history with more than 1,000 kills and 1,000 digs. The last player to do that was Devin Crotteau, who played from 2007-09.
• Hannah Hashbarger broke into MSUB's top five career assist leaders by dishing out her 1,881^st assist last week. With five games to go, Hashbarger not only has a chance at surpassing fourth-place Mandi Taylor's 1,932 career assists, but also reaching the 2,000-assist plateau. Hashbarger averages 8.01 assists-per-set, which ranks sixth in the GNAC.
• True freshman libero Christine Funk's 4.32 digs per set ranks second in the GNAC.

 
UP NEXT: MSUB plays Seattle Pacific this Saturday, Nov. 6 at 3 p.m. MT. Livestream and live stat links can be found at the women's volleyball schedule page on msubsports.com.