DENVER – This new player in the MSU Denver lineup looked pretty good Friday night.
 
Oh, actually that was two-time first-team All-American and two-time RMAC Player of the Year Rylee Hladky who made her return after a five-match absence.
 
No. 7 MSU Denver rolled to its ninth consecutive victory, a 3-0 sweep against New Mexico Highlands in which it surrendered only 35 points (25-9, 25-15, 25-11).
 
"It's great to have Rylee back on the floor, just from everything she brings from a production standpoint and from a leadership standpoint," MSU Denver coach Jenny Glenn said.
 
Hladky had seven kills on .462 hitting and chipped in three blocks (one solo).
 
"I was probably less nervous than usual, which is really odd," Hladky said of her return to action. "I've learned to trust everyone around me more. I already did, but now it's in a different way. My team brought me more confidence in myself. And they had confidence coming to me in this game."
 
Having seen her team continue to excel without her – including a relatively easy 3-1 win at then-No. 11 Colorado Mesa – instilled confidence for both Hladky and her teammates.
 
"I'm so proud of every single one of them, and it's been fun to watch them," Hladky said. "I get teary-eyed thinking, 'Oh my gosh, these are my people.' They do such a good job and I have complete trust in them. I wasn't stressed, because I knew they would take care of business."
 
While Riley Anderson continued to run up RMAC Player of the Year-worthy exploits and Maddie Lindsay picked up where Hladky left off, MSU Denver seems that much stronger moving forward.
 
"You talk about your unity and your depth on a team, but it isn't real until it's tested on the court and in pressure situations," Glenn said. "We saw that in the last five matches. We were tested in some tough matches and we were victorious because of our depth. We did a great job of adjusting, and our team learned a lot, as did Rylee. We're better off now just from the lessons that we've learned."
 
The Roadrunners (12-3 overall, 5-0 RMAC) had little trouble with a struggling Highlands team that dropped to 1-15 and 0-5 after the 66-minute match concluded.

"It was a good chance for us to work on ourselves," Hladky said. "We've been talking about controlling what's on our side of the net."
 
Mikayla McClinton had seven kills on .636 hitting (no errors, 11 attacks) while adding five blocks, and Lindsay had six kills while hitting .417 (one error, 12 attacks). Delaney Eckhardt (15) and Amela Qershia (13) combined for 28 assists while directing the team to a season-best .388 hitting percentage, including .524 (13 kills, two errors, 21 attacks) in the first set. Qershia had three of the Roadrunners' seven service aces, and Abbie McCrimmon had a match-high 15 digs.
 
"I'm pleased with how we played, from start to finish, pretty consistently on our side of the net," Glenn said. "It could be easy to get distracted or change the pace of how we play, but we did a nice job of playing with consistent pressure all the way to the end."
 
The Roadrunners' freshmen – Kryssa Moerman, Alivia Huxoll, GabriElle Brewer, Megan Hagar and Autumn Gibbs – all got extended playing time.
 
"It was good to get them some match experience in a pressure situation," Glenn said. "What I love about this group is that they want to play and they love to play. They go in there and they do a great job."
 
Now the Roadrunners take their second consecutive Saturday off, an unusual quirk in the RMAC schedule.
 
"It's never happened before in my time here, and I'm not going to complain about it, because it's midseason and midseason is always tough on the body," Hladky said. "So it's a blessing we get to have this extra time off and we're taking it and recovering and doing things that mentally keep us excited to play volleyball because the season does get long. This is keeping us more engaged."
 
Said Glenn: "We're training hard during the week, and when we have that extra day off, we talk about using it to our advantage because we don't get it back. We want to make sure we're resting and recovering because the second half of our schedule is going to be pretty grueling."
 
The match was also MSU Denver's only home contest in a six-week span between Sept. 16 and Oct. 26.
 
"It was great to be back home, and we had a great crowd tonight," Glenn said. "To play in front of our home crowd and sleep in our own beds, it was just great to be home again. Unfortunately, we're going back on the road for the next couple weeks, but we'll be home a lot after that."