Seniors Chuck Warner and Josh Biros tried to keep the team focused on the eve of what turned out to be one of the most memorable days of their lives.

"There were definitely butterflies Friday night," Biros said. "This was the year, and everyone knew it."

"We had a good run last year when we finished fifth," Warner said. "We had high expectations for ourselves … we made ourselves nervous."

For a while it looked as if it were not meant to be. The Marquette men's club volleyball team, which entered the NIRSA tournament as the second overall seed out of 48 teams, trailed for a majority of the first game of the national championship match Saturday against fourth-seeded Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

Then the seniors turned the tide to snatch the first game, and the squad cruised in the second game for a 28-26, 25-20 victory in Kansas City, Mo.

Trailing, 20-16, in the first game, Warner served Marquette back into it and cut the deficit to one. With the score tied at 26 and what Marquette head coach Brian Nash called UW-Oshkosh's best server in control, Biros made a decisive block to win the point.

"After I blocked it, I just started running around like a maniac," Biros said.

The team went 9-0 and lost a single game over three days of tournament action to close the season with a 61-8-3 record. In the single elimination matches Saturday, Marquette defeated Pennsylvania, San Diego State and Lakeland before the championship match.

Although Marquette had won eight of 14 combined regular season meetings against its Wisconsin-based opponents in the final and semifinal matches, Nash expressed concern.

"Since we knew all their weaknesses, they knew all of our weaknesses," he said. "I was afraid familiarity would breed contempt."

A majority of the approximately 3,000 fans were cheering for UW-Oshkosh in the final, which did nothing to soothe the jitters of the Marquette players, Biros said.

"At one point I turned to my brother and said, 'wow, I am really really nervous,'" he said.

Once the team gained the momentum after winning the first game, the nerves vanished.

UW-Oshkosh "just couldn't match our intensity in the second game," Biros said.

Warner was named tournament MVP, and sophomore Marc Babyar, junior Tom Liszka, senior Steve Austin and sophomore Matt Zwolski were also named to the all-tournament team.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 21 2005.