Hawaii Men’s Volleyball improves to 6-0 with sweep of Princeton ahead of first road trip

After seeing its previous two matches go more than three sets, the fourth-ranked Hawai’i men’s volleyball team made it a clean sweep Friday night.

Before a season-high crowd of 6,297 at Simplify Arena at Stan Sheriff Center, the Rainbow Warriors came away with a 25-17, 25-17, 25-23 sweep of No. 19 Princeton to improve to 6-0 ahead of their first road trip of the season.

Hawai’i hummed to commanding victories in the first two sets by hitting on a .457 clip, but ran into some trouble in the third after a 18-11 lead. Ultimately, the Rainbow Warrior were able to finish the match with a game-winning block from Justin Todd in the second straight Friday night in a row.

“That’s two times now that I’ve had the game-winning block and hearing the fans go wild is the best feeling,” Todd said.

He also said the team is coming together and wanted to redeem themselves to get their first sweep in nine days.

“I think we were just looking back and like thinking we’ve given up a lot of sets,” said Todd. “We Just didn’t want to do that anymore. We kind of realized that we weren’t being very serious so we just pointed it out and started to get better tonight.”

Todd finished with five kills and six total blocks in his third straight start at middle blocker. Adrien Roure led the team in kills with 10 while Clay Wieter had nine more to round out the top attackers.

The Rainbow Warriors will have a week off before traveling to Provo, Utah to take on BYU on back-to-back nights.