Bowling Green State University’s volleyball team closes the regular season this weekend with two matches that bookend the Falcons’ year: Senior Night at home against Eastern Michigan on Friday, then the Battle of I-75 finale at Toledo on Saturday night. Friday’s first serve at the Stroh Center is set for 6 p.m., and Saturday’s match at Savage Arena starts at 7:30 p.m., with both matches streaming on ESPN+, according to Bowling Green State University Athletics.
Friday night belongs to the Falcons’ five seniors — Amanda Otten, Marija Tabak, Anery Hobson, Helen Wilford and Edyta Waclawczyk — who will be honored after the Eastern Michigan match. The athletic department is also running a Falcon Friday family pack and a pre-match Falcon Hour with discounted concessions from 5 to 6 p.m., BGSU Athletics said.
Bowling Green arrives at the weekend looking to snap a three-match losing streak, and it does so with a resume few MAC teams can match. The Falcons have tallied 10 wins in conference play for the 11th consecutive season, and during league play they lead the Mid-American Conference in points (17.77), kills (13.84), assists (12.95) and blocks (2.61) per set, according to BGSU Athletics.
The defense is the headline number. Opponents are hitting just .169 against Bowling Green this season — the lowest opponent attack percentage by any MAC team, the 10th-lowest in the nation, and the program’s best mark at this point in a season since the COVID-shortened 2020-21 campaign, when opponents hit .151 in a MAC-only schedule, BGSU Athletics said.
Senior setter Amanda Otten keeps climbing the program record book in her final season. Otten has 3,179 career assists, third-most in Bowling Green’s rally-scoring era and sixth all-time, and she sits 215 assists away from passing Laura Avila (2010-13) for second in the rally-scoring era and fifth all-time. The program record belongs to Linda Popovich, who recorded 4,406 assists from 1986-89, according to BGSU Athletics.
At the net, redshirt junior Helen Wilford is having what BGSU Athletics calls a blockbuster season: she leads the conference in total blocks (131) and blocks per set (1.32), with her total ranking 10th in the nation. Bowling Green as a team has 261.5 total blocks — fifth among NCAA teams — on 405 block assists and 59 solo blocks.
The attack runs through four hitters who have combined for 1,094 of the Falcons’ 1,359 kills this season, 80.5 percent of the team’s offense: Avery Hobson with 353 kills, Anastasija Bozic with 343, Karli Molnau with 262 and Cecily Waynar with 136, BGSU Athletics said. The Falcons have also recorded 23 double-doubles this season, most in the conference, led by Bozic’s 10 and Otten’s seven.
Saturday’s finale renews one of the MAC’s best rivalries. The Battle of I-75, presented by Fremont Federal Credit Union, sends Bowling Green up the interstate to Savage Arena to face Toledo in the last match of the regular season for both programs — a rivalry meeting with conference tournament seeding energy, even before the bracket is set.
It is a busy week inside the Stroh Center, where the volleyball finale follows the Bowling Green men’s basketball team’s Thursday night home game against Niagara, part of a full November slate for Falcon athletics.
What happens next is the postseason. Bowling Green begins play in the Mid-American Conference Championship at Worthen Arena in Muncie, Indiana, on November 20-21, BGSU Athletics said. Two wins this weekend — one to stop the skid, one over the Falcons’ biggest rival — would send Bowling Green into Muncie with its defense, its senior setter and its blocking wall all pointed the right way.
For the five seniors honored Friday, the weekend is a last regular-season lap through two arenas they know well. The Stroh Center crowd gets the first goodbye on Friday night; the rivalry gets the last word on Saturday in Toledo.
Fans who cannot make either match can follow both on ESPN+, and the Falcons’ social channels will carry updates through the weekend, BGSU Athletics said. However the weekend ends, Bowling Green’s seniors close the regular season the way they have played it — at the center of one of the MAC’s deepest, most balanced lineups.
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