NATCHITOCHES – Two sets into Friday night's Southland Conference Tournament quarterfinal match against Central Arkansas, the Northwestern State volleyball team had all the momentum and, it seemed, a touch of magic left over from 2014.
 
The seventh-seeded Lady Demons broke to a two-set lead against the No. 2 seed Sugar Bears, but Central Arkansas gathered itself and ran off the final three sets to outlast Northwestern State, 3-2 (20-25, 19-25, 25-19, 25-15, 15-12) at a rocking Prather Coliseum.
 
"UCA came out and, like we say, spun the dial," fourth-year head coach Sean Kiracofe said. "We had different matchups in the second. They changed it because – I assume – they saw I wanted a certain matchup. We came back and won (the second set) anyway.
 
"Then it becomes a battle of, 'Do they change because they know I want to change?' or because we won, do we force them to change? We got the matchup we didn't necessarily want in sets two and three. They had some advantages in certain situations and took advantage of those advantages."
 
Buoyed by a raucous home crowd, Northwestern State played inspired in the first two sets, hitting .483 in the opening set and .304 in the second, committing just two errors in each set.
 
The Lady Demons (12-15) also limited the Sugar Bears (25-5) to a .114 hitting percentage in the first set and a .194 mark in the second.
 
A strong start from the service line also aided NSU in building its early lead. The Lady Demons had four of their six aces in the first two sets while UCA committed five service errors in the fifth set alone.
 
The Lady Demons managed just two aces in the final three sets.
 
"I could argue it's not that they passed better, but we missed a few serves in some costly areas," Kiracofe said. "The problem with that is you tend to serve easier to not miss any more. They're a team that passes well, and when they pass well, they have kids who will put the ball away."
 
The Sugar Bears began to do just that in the final three sets.
 
Locked in a 16-all tie after a combo block by NSU's Skylar Besch and Kourtney Seaton, the Sugar Bears rattled off a 4-0 run to snap the tie and finished the set by scoring nine of the final 12 points.
 
That momentum carried over to the fourth set where Central Arkansas hit .516, committing just two errors on 31 attacks.
 
Undaunted, Northwestern State bounced back in the fifth set, looking to extend its conference tournament win streak in Prather Coliseum to four matches. The only other time NSU hosted the Southland tournament was in 2014 when NSU swept through three matches to earn its lone NCAA Tournament berth.
 
Neither team built more than a two-point advantage through the first 23 points of the decisive fifth set with the turning point coming with the set tied at 9.
 
Besch, NSU's freshman setter, took a shot toward the corner that was ruled out, allowing Central Arkansas to take a one-point lead.
 
The Lady Demons responded with the next two points on a block by Seaton and Alexis Warren and a kill from Hannah Brister, who capped a remarkable second half of the season with 19 kills.
 
Central Arkansas had one final run in it, scoring the next four points before Brister quieted the run. After a timeout, Haley Tippett put down her 18^th kill to clinch the match.
 
Tippett was one of four Sugar Bears who had double-figure kills, led by Kellen Dunn's 21.
 
"We're not a seven seed," Kiracofe said. "We've shown we can play with absolutely anybody in this conference. The consistency just wasn't there. I've talked about with (coach) Brad (Laird) in football. They figured some things out in the last couple of games. We played fantastic, but there were moments where we had to stay the course and do some things to either pull away or maintain a lead. It was better in this match than it was in past matches, but when we needed it, it wasn't there in some moments.
 
"In the fourth set, some things went wrong for us, but I'm happy with the way we battled back in the fifth. We pushed them as hard as anyone could."