BROOKINGS — The South Dakota State Jackrabbits saw their program-record 22-match winning streak come to an end as they fell to St. Thomas in five sets at First Bank & Trust Arena on Friday night.

The Jackrabbits and Tommies were evenly matched throughout the night but SDSU head coach Dan Georgalas attributed the loss to St. Thomas playing a cleaner game than his team, allowing them to earn the victory by scores of 22-25, 25-22, 25-16, 15-25 and 16-14.

“Statistically, it’s an unbelievable match on paper,” Georgalas said. “The kills are almost identical, the blocks are almost identical, the aces are almost identical. At the end of the day, they just played a little bit cleaner.”

The mirror match played out as both teams battled in a tight first set. St. Thomas raced out to a 6-2 lead but SDSU rallied back to tie the set at 9-9. The Jackrabbits and Tommies remained deadlocked at 17-17 when Sylvie Zgonc’s kill put the Jacks in front for the first time and sparked a 6-2 spurt that gave them a 23-19 lead on a block by Sydni Schetnan and Alyssa Groves that forced an attack error by Ellie Gustafson.

SDSU forced set point on a Schetnan kill and won the set 25-22 on a kill by Madison Burr but St. Thomas jumped out to a 6-3 lead at the beginning of the second set. SDSU once again rallied to take a 17-16 lead on a kill by Burr, but St. Thomas responded by scoring two of the next three points to tie the set at 18-18 before a long rally would tip momentum in their favor.

In a sequence that had multiple dives and saves, St. Thomas gained the upper hand with a kill by Lauren Galvin. An unsuccessful challenge by SDSU allowed St. Thomas to surge forward, picking up a 25-22 win on another kill by Galvin to finish the set.

“I really like how efficient and how many points they scored in transition,” Georgalas said of the rally. “They were taking our digs, they were centering them up and they were being really aggressive through the pins and just kept swinging. I thought our off-speed volume got a little but high and ultimately, they just played more consistently, they played more connected than we did and we had stretches of volleyball where we really lost our rhythm.”

The most uncharacteristic stretch for SDSU came at the beginning of the third set. St. Thomas raced out to an 8-3 lead which led to an SDSU timeout and extended the lead to 11-3 which left Georgalas giving his team an animated pep talk on the Jackrabbit bench.

“The whole message this week was to have two hands on the wheel and be focused. We wanted to look through the windshield and not the rear-view mirror,” Georgalas said. “I loved our practices this week. We benefitted from having an extra day off and they were really fresh…I just thought we lacked a little bit of intensity. I don’t know if winning that first set made us take the foot off the gas and expect them to hand [the match] to us, but they’ve been an elite team all season.”

St. Thomas validated Georgalas’s comments with a dominant 25-16 win in the third set and held a 9-7 lead early in the fourth set. With the Jacks trailing, they made their move beginning with a service error by Payton Willman and an attack error by Addie Schmotzer. SDSU took the lead three points later when Schetnan’s block forced an attack error by Tezra Rudzitis.

The stretch flipped the switch for SDSU, who finished the fourth set on an 18-6 run and forced a fifth set with a 25-15 victory.

St. Thomas raced out to an 8-4 lead in the final set and forced matchpoint at 14-8 when a block by Rudzitis and Addie Schmotzer forced an attack error by Zgonc. But SDSU scored six straight points to tie the set at 14-14 on Burr’s ace.

With the streak on the line, Rudzitis gave the Tommies their second match point on a kill and an attack error by Zgonc went out of bounds to end SDSU’s streak.

“I’ve been preparing for this. We were going to lose eventually,” Georgalas said of the loss. “If we had gone on a perfect season, that would have been miraculous. But I’ve been preparing for this opportunity. We’re going to handle it with class. We’re going to handle it with maturity.” 

Georgalas also said the loss allows his team to take a look at itself as it heads down the stretch.

“We’re going to use this opportunity to get better and we haven’t had that yet this season – to lose and get back into the practice and film room and really talk about why teams are beating us and then get better at those areas,” Georgalas said. “We’ve been trying…but there’s something about the loss that just stings a little bit more and I love where we are at with four matches to go. This is still an amazing volleyball team and I told them I’m just as excited to come into work tomorrow as I did the day after each of the 22 victories.”

Zgonc led SDSU offensively with 21 kills, adding 13 digs, four assists and a pair of total blocks. Burr had nine kills, a pair of aces, four digs and four total blocks while Katie Van Egdom had nine kills and four digs.

Schetnan had eight kills, a dig and six total blocks. Alyssa Groves had six kills and four total blocks. Anna Ventling-Brown had five kills and two blocks. Rylee Martin had 23 assists, nine digs, three aces and three kills. Camrynn Honn had 22 assists, 10 digs, a kill and an ace.

Rachel Wieber had four assists, eight digs and a service ace. Joslyn Richardson had 16 digs and four assists.

Galvin led St. Thomas with 16 kills. Morgan Kealy led the Tommies with 43 assists and Willman had two aces. Ella Voegele had a team-high 24 digs and Megan Wetter led St. Thomas with eight total blocks.

With the winning streak over, the Jacks will host North Dakota State on Saturday at 1 p.m. But the accomplishment of winning 22 straight matches isn’t lost on Georgalas and his team and they’ll look to start a new winning streak on Saturday along with achieving some of the bigger goals they have for the final stretch.

“I’m so proud of it,” Georgalas said of the streak. “It was an absolutely miraculous run with program records after program records. But our goals are still unaccomplished. We want to win the conference championship and we want to go to the NCAA Tournament. If that loss gets us there, it was for the best.”