UAAP volleyball: NU vents ire on UP then casts vengeful look at UST

National University (NU) was hungry to settle a score when it met a familiar tormentor in La Salle recently. But the Lady Bulldogs still couldn’t find the right answers and dropped to their knees again to the defending champions.

And with the old wounds reopened, NU needed an avenue to vent its ire on.

“The team’s mind has somewhat still not moved on from our loss to La Salle because we really wanted to get back at [the Lady Spikers],” Bella Belen said after NU poured its frustrations on University of the Philippines (UP), 25-21, 30-32, 25-17, 25-19 in UAAP women’s volleyball action on Wednesday.

READ: NU fends off UP to begin UAAP women’s volleyball second round

“Thinking about that over and over again and wanting to finally get the win, we couldn’t move properly,” she added.

La Salle blanked NU in Season 85’s title series with a Game 2 reverse sweep for the crown and the Lady Bulldogs have patiently waited for a chance to exact its revenge on the Lady Spikers.

The much-anticipated rematch at Smart Araneta Coliseum went down the wire with NU, led by junior stars Belen and Alyssa Solomon and sophomore Vange Alinsug, losing again to La Salle, now spearheaded by last year’s Rookie of the Year-Most Valuable Player Angel Canino, Shevana Laput, Thea Gagate and team captain Julia Coronel.

“One of our realizations from our last game is that we should not stop [competing] until the game is over because it’s like our play went down after every other set,” Belen said.

“Right after that game, of course we were sad because we were so close to winning but still, we lost,” she added. “But we couldn’t dwell on it too much because the second round would start immediately.”

“We can’t get anything out of being sad girls so we talked about our lapses and what we should improve on,” said Belen, accepting that they would need to wait to get another crack at the Lady Spikers.

Redemption campaign

Still licking their wounds, the Lady Bulldogs watched as Alinsug finished with 24 points and Belen added 21 more against the Fighting Maroons, who were coming off a breakthrough win over University of the East to end their first round schedule.

For now, NU will get to settle another score as it next battles University of Santo Tomas (UST), one of the two squads that handed it a loss in its redemption campaign.

NU will need to address a recurring problem of having slow starts and committing a huge number of errors if they want to stand a chance against the Golden Tigresses, who are aggressive from the get go.

“We need consistency because giving errors to UST, [the Tigresses] will take advantage of it. They are fighters and when it comes to our game with them, we can’t commit a lot of errors,” Belen said. “We just need to trust in ourselves.”