By Jewel Della Valle

The volleyball team’s struggles continued this weekend, and senior captain Kira Batura said they’ve only got themselves to blame. Northeastern dropped to 6-9 on the season after defeating Brown, and losing to Albany and Eastern Michigan at last weekend’s Albany Classic.

“We’ve been beating ourselves,” Batura said. “We’re the ones that can control our mistakes. We bleed off too many errors and our own personal mistakes that we get too far behind in a game to come back in rally score volleyball.”

The Huskies faced Brown Friday and took game one easily, winning 30-17. Brown came back in game two with five straight points to make it 29-29, but Northeastern pulled out the win with kills from junior outside hitter Brianna Seitz and kills from Batura to win 31-29. The Huskies took game three 30-20.

Freshman middle hitter Caitlin Tittl led all players with a .409 hitting percentage and had 11 kills. Batura tallied her fourth double-double of the season with a match-high in kills (12) and digs (17). Junior outside hitter Lauren DeTurk had 14 digs with seven kills and sophomore setter Jessica Tkachuk had 17 assists. The Huskies hit .179 for the match and had nine service aces.

“Our serve, serve-receive game was really good and basically we had confidence,” Batura said. “We passed well. We were able to attack well and our serving was really aggressive so that made it really easy to get the other team out of system and be able to play with confidence from our side of the net.”

But the Huskies couldn’t carry that confidence into the night match against Albany. Though Northeastern came close in games one and two, losing 24-30 and 26-30, the team couldn’t pull out the win and the Great Danes quickly disposed of them in game three, winning 30-20.

“It was a lot of little things that added up,” Batura said. “There were serving, passing errors, hitting a lot of balls out. It wasn’t just one part of our game.