EDMONTON – The match got to the middle part of the third set and it was like the lights went off for the MacEwan Griffins men's volleyball team.

Going on an almost-unheard-of 15-2 run, the UBC Thunderbirds sprinted from a 10-10 tie into a 25-12 win, en route to a 3-1 Saturday night victory that clinched a weekend sweep for the visitors.

"I wish I knew," said Griffins head coach Brad Poplawski when asked why. "A run like that at this level is unacceptable. We just can't have that."

After the 25-19, 19-25, 25-12, 25-17 win, the Thunderbirds move to 6-4 in the Canada West standings, while the Griffins will head into the semester break at 2-10.

There will be plenty for Poplawski to mull over before the team's next action on Jan. 13 vs. Calgary.

"We just absolutely lost all our passing and right now we're not a very good high-ball hitting team," he said of the fateful third set, which snowballed into a fourth set where they were up and down. "So if teams can hit us out of system, we're really struggling to score.

"Our best situation is just a good continue and more often than not we're making errors," he added. "We finally get a side out and then we miss a serve. When something's going wrong, you've got to be able to stop it sooner. We just let it snowball."

In the first set, the Griffins were playing catch-up the whole way, but never could get over the hump. They fell 25-19 when Shane Kerrison's serve went long.
 
The positives on the night for MacEwan came in the second set when they showed the kind of fight that netted them their first two wins of the season a weekend previous vs. Thompson Rivers.
 
They mixed in heavy doses of Kai Hesthammer kills, and some blasts from Lee Iverson and Jordan Peters, who gave UBC a dose of its own medicine on the back row pipe play by splaying the ball across the back line for a 21-15 MacEwan advantage.
 
UBC didn't help itself with several service errors in the set, including the most crucial one. When Irvan Brar's jump spin serve hit mesh, the Griffins sealed a 25-18 win.
 
"We didn't execute as well in that set they won, but to give them full credit, I thought they played excellent in that set," said UBC head coach Kerry MacDonald. "That was their best set of volleyball this weekend. They put the pressure on us, especially from the service line and they broke down our serve-receive and disrupted our flow on offence. So all the credit to them in that one.
 
"I thought we did a good job of regrouping after that and made some adjustments on our serve to help us the rest of the way."
 
Poplawski was pleased with the effort in that set, even if the end result wasn't two points in the standings.
 
"We stopped shooting ourselves in the foot," he said. "We didn't make the hitting errors. We put some service pressure on them. (Cristian) Sides put us on a big run with some service and we did the things we needed to do to be successful.
"When we finally started passing, it led to us being able to have all four options running, instead of just passing twos and only having two options. We did a better job of that, we just couldn't sustain it."

UBC really got rolling and by the fourth set, they were raining kills from Brar and Mat Guidi at a rate that put MacEwan down.

"Those two guys are core components of our offence," said MacDonald. "We pride ourselves on having a nice balanced attack. On any given night, one guy can go off on our team and really carry us or we can be balanced across the board. We saw that again tonight. Irvan is frequently in that group and Guidi can be as well. He did a good job tonight.

"Great job from our setter distributing the ball well and making it tough on the other team defensively."

That would be Byron Keturakis, who recorded 43 assists, mixing in eight kills of his own. Guidi led the Thunderbirds with 14 kills, while Brar and Joel Regehr added nine each.

The Griffins were led for the second-straight night by Iverson, who recorded 12 kills, while Hesthammer added nine. UBC out-blocked MacEwan 20-8. Next up for the Thunderbirds is a home match against UBC Okanagan on Jan. 6.