NATCHITOCHES – The block giveth and the block taketh away.
 
On a night where Northwestern State and Southeastern combined for 20 total blocks, 10 for each team, across three sets, it was the Lions that found success with ball off the block where the Demons did not.
 
Time and time again the Lions found points off of Demon hands and arms while NSU's attacks skipped off just as many Lion hands and arms but found their way into the waiting platform of SLU defenders in Saturday night's 3-0 (25-20, 25-18, 25-15) loss.
 
"Credit to their attackers, they were swinging into our block with a purpose," head coach Sean Kiracofe said. "We made some errors here and there, a lot of it had to do with their swings and some of it was our block was angled out when we should have been squared up. It's little tiny detail things that matter in a match like this against a good team."
 
Like they had done in the previous two matches, the Demons set the tone for what they wanted and needed to do from the service line. Northwestern had three aces in the first set, getting two of them, one from Deja Benjamin and another from Hunter MacFarland, as part of a 5-1 run that gave the Demons a 15-12 lead.
 
A Lion service error and a Demon block from Benjamin and Gabby Seeds made it an 18-15 game with the home team in control of play. The strong starts to each rally led to seven Southeastern hitting errors through that point in the match to give the Demons the late advantage.
 
One of the things that plagued the Demons all season, the inability to find the clutch points in the critical moments late in sets, showed itself again however. 
 
The Lions rattled off a 10-2 run behind six kills, three of them plus a block assist coming from SLU middle India Bennett in the run, and did not make another hitting error the rest of the set. Three unforced NSU errors also helped push the finishing run along for the Lions.
 
The growing trend of Lion attacks finding the ground off the Demon block kicked into high gear during the run with the same being true of NSU's attacks turning into easy digs off the Lion block.
 
The biggest evidence for Southeastern's ability to slow down the Demon attack was the way it held NSU's two uber-talented outsides, Reaghan Thompson and Teresa Garza to just one combined kill in the first set on 17 total swings.
 
"The first set was just the story of the entire season," Kiracofe said. "It ended 25-20 but it was played much closer than that. I hope that they appreciate how close they were to winning that set against clearly the best team in the conference. Once again we did not do anything exceptional. Once again we just made some unacceptable errors throughout the set but especially there at the end."
 
The Lions made a 6-0 run early on in the second set that gave them a four-point lead. While the Demons were able to settle in and essentially score point-for-point with the Lions the rest of the frame, they ran out of points to trade against the efficient Lion attackers.
 
After hitting .176 in the first set thanks to the seven attack errors, the Lions had just nine errors the rest of the night, only three of them unforced by the NSU block, and hit over .300 in both the second and third sets.
 
Garza and Thompson each had five-kill sets in the match, Garza in the third and Thompson in the second, but were both held below a .100 attack percentage for the night.  
 
On the block-heavy night, Samaya Wesson matched a season high with six rejections for the Demons, two behind match-leader Bennett for SLU. Benjamin had four rejections in the match giving her 117 total for the season, the seventh most in a single year by a Demon player.