Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong for National University.
The Lady Bulldogs once made history after finishing the first round of the UAAP Season 80 women’s volleyball tournament as top seeded team for the first time in school’s history with 6-1 record.
But that stretch for the Lady Bulldogs seems like an eternity ago after they entered a disastrous free fall, losing all four of their second round matches.
NU’s latest defeat was against the University of Santo Tomas, which is survival mode, 22-25, 25-23, 25-21, 25-9, Sunday at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
This collapse has seen the mighty become the humble, and setter Jasmin Nabor admits the pain of losing after such a dominant run has taken a toll on them.
“I think we can’t carry this much emotion anymore,” said Nabor in Filipino. “It hurts so bad because we’ve done everything, but we don’t know why the end result always ends up like this.”
NU’s 6-5 record puts it at the fourth spot but the Lady Bulldogs are not on stable ground as the line that separates them from fifth seed Adamson University and sixth seed University of Santo Tomas is as thin as paper.
The Lady Bulldogs are just one game ahead the Lady Falcons and two games ahead the Golden Tigresses.
Nabor said the team turned emotional after their loss to UST, and it wasn’t just the setback that hurt them—the venue itself was a source of sorrow for the Lady Bulldogs.
The Lady Bulldogs failed to enter the Final Four in Season 79 after they lost their last elimination game of the tournament against, as fate would have it, the Golden Tigresses—who ended up as the no. 3 team—at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
“We still have memories of this venue because this was where we got eliminated in Season 79 against the same team that beat us today,” said Nabor who had 37 excellent sets against UST. “So it was like all of those emotions once again taking over us.”