KENOSHA, Wis. – The Carthage College Red Men dropped a match for the first time in 2017, as the #4 men's volleyball team fell to #14 New York University, Saturday at Tarble Arena in five sets [23-25, 25-18, 20-25, 25-18, 13-15].
 
The loss sends Carthage to 1-1 on the season, while NYU moves to 3-0 on the young season.
 
"It was an exciting match," opened head coach L.J. Marx following the loss.  "Having seen NYU play earlier this season against Benedictine and Dominican we know they were going to be a handful and probably better than everybody is expecting them to be.  Especially with the number of freshmen they have out there.  They played a fantastic match and gave us everything we could handle.  I can't say that we played poorly.  I think we did a lot of thing really well today.  They were just a little bit better than us."
 
Kai Cromwell led Carthage with a team-high 11 kills followed by Marc Hansen with ten and middles Max Bongratz and Zach Lillig with nine each.  Matt Reinsel finished with 46 assists for Carthage and defensively Cody Bolan led the Red Men with 11 digs.
 
After dropping the first set, the Red Men responded with a strong second set win led by Marc Hansen, who tallied six kills in the set.  The Red Men evened the match at 1-1 thanks to a .346 hitting percentage to NYU's .160. 
 
After NYU regained the lead, Carthage answered for a second time with a 25-18 win to even the match, as Max Bongratz finished the fourth with five kills on five attacks.  
 
The hotly contested fifth set saw the Red Men and Violets changed points most of the set.  However strong defense at the net in very end by NYU doomed Carthage to a 15-13 defeat in the set. 
 
NYU was led by freshman Alex Li who finished with 28 kills on 45 swings on the afternoon.
 
Next up for the Red Men, Carthage will go into Midwest College Volleyball League-play with a trip to Michigan to face Olivet College on Friday and Adrian College on Saturday.
 
Looking at the MCVL slate Marx said "We know we have to take care of conference-play and we know that will not be easy.  We are going to have to play at a high level.  The good news is we had two non-conference matches to start the season against two very good teams.  We have learned what we do well and know what we need to work on moving forward.  So we have, essentially, a five-day window to start getting better at those things before conference-play begins."