LAS VEGAS -- The Thunderbird volleyball team wrapped up competition in Las Vegas on Saturday, falling to the Indiana Hoosiers 3-0.

"Last night we allowed ourselves to get worked up a little bit emotionally and lost our confidence, but today was a much different animal," SUU head coach Pete Hoyer said. "We stayed aggressive and played with passion through the whole match. I think we did Indiana a favor and pushed them because I think their athletes played extremely well, far better than they did yesterday from my perspective, but we forced them to play. They performed, we performed, obviously we didn't get the result but we actually built a foundation we could do a lot of things with."

The first set was all Hoosiers, as the team from Indiana took the opening set 25-10.

In the second set the T-Birds and Hoosiers were all knotted up at 11-11, but unfortunately for SUU that's when Indiana got hot. The Hoosiers 14-5 run to close out the set and take a 2-0 lead in the match.

The third and final set saw Indiana jump out to a 6-0 lead and never look back, beating the T-Birds 25-13 in the frame and 3-0 in the match.

Janet Kalaniuvalu led the T-Birds with eight kills. Mckenzie Dowell finished with five kills and a .444 hitting percentage. Alexis Averett had 20 assists for the Thunderbirds in the match.

Following the conclusion of the match Miahna Waters was named to the UNLV Invitational All-Tournament Team. Waters had 39 digs over the course of the three matches.  

The Thunderbirds will be in Phoenix, Arizona next weekend to take on Grand Canyon (August 31), Boston College (September 1) and Jacksonville State (September 1).

"Having been with the team only four weeks in the spring and just having the two weeks of two-a-days there's still a ton of stuff we need to address technique wise, system wise that you don't have time for that beforehand," Hoyer said. "We need to be a better blocking team and more disciplined, and haven't had the luxury of spending more time on it. We have a couple of positions that are still up in the air, we have to develop our bench so that over a long season we have options if someone is struggling on any given night, our offense needs to be more consistent, so my list is long but with the energy we showed today and the way we fought we can teach the techniques, we can learn systems, we can clean things up once we have that energy being the foundation of it all."  

Stay updated on the Thunderbirds 24/7 by following @SUUVolleyball on Twitter and Instagram along with liking the Southern Utah Volleyball page on Facebook.

Fans can visit www.tbirdtickets.com to purchase tickets for the 2018 Thunderbird volleyball season.