It was a funny kind of roller coaster the men's volleyball team got on last night. The ride lasted two and a half hours.

The long anticipated match-up between seventh-ranked Rutgers-Newark and No. 12 Penn State had to leave one team with its first mark in the loss column of Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association play. Which team it would be took five volatile, up and down games to decide.

In the end it was the Red Raiders (23-8) who left Rec Hall with the numeral zero still showing in their EIVA loss column as they came back to beat Penn State (12-10), 15-6, 15-17, 10-15, 15-7 and 15-13.

Inconsistency on the part of both teams reflected itself in the early game scores --the Lions lost the first game by nine points, but then steamrolled to an 11-2 lead in the second game only to be forced to a tie at 15-15 before Ramon Hernandez served the last two points for the win.

Game three was the first close one of the match as Penn State broke from a 7-7 tie to take the game. Game four, however, saw Rutgers fight out of its hole by taking an 11-4 lead en route to an eight-point win.

For Penn State Coach Tom Peterson, who has stressed all season that team consistency must improve, the loss was troubling.

"Tonight, we didn't turn it on when we had to and that means all the time," Coach Tom Peterson said. "We waited and waited, the first game we came out asnd were just waiting to get going. Everybody was just waiting for somebody else to do it. But nobody was.

"We started making mistakes that we shouldn't be making at this time in the season -- who's going where, and what kind of set's going to happen, who's digging and being stopped on defense -- just very fundamental things. . . In all aspects it's just something you wouldn't expect at the end of the year."

Rightside hitter Tom Gingrich, playing in his last regular season home game, saw similar problems in consistency as he looked towards the team's mental state as the source.

"I think it was more of a roller coaster as far as emotion is concerned," he said. "I think our skills are basically consistent, it's just that our mentality and our emotional status was a little up and down."

The Lions used their depth to keep their lineup from also being anything but consistent. Aaron Zoerner and Winfield Evens split the duties at the middle blocker position. Ricky Roper came in for powerful outside hitter David Muir. Muir, who leads the team in kills, hit at a negative hitting percentage in the first game.

Roper collected 17 kills, fourth on the team behind an amazing 33 from Ramon Hernandez, 26 from Brian Miller and 18 from Gingrich.

The Red Raiders were led by their Ukranian import, Igor Akinshyn, with 30 kills on 74 attempts. The sophomore outside hitter has been credited with a good deal of his team's success so far.

"He's the best player that's been in Rec Hall, and that includes Stanford and Pepperdine," Peterson said. "He has more experience, on the collegiate level, than anyone else in the country."

Last night's match was the team's fourth game in five days and part of a swing that will see the team play ten matches in fourteen days.

The team must now play at Rutgers and win by a score of at least 3-1 to gain the top seed at the EIVA championship, April 17-18 in Rec Hall. The top seed between the two teams will be determined by total number of games won in their regular season matches against each other. Thus Penn State, who is now down by 3-2, must gain two games on the Raiders to claim the top spot.

Peterson said that if the right Penn State team comes out on the court in New Jersey, the results will be different.

"I think we can beat that team," he said. "We just have to turn it up a notch. It's just concentration and thinking about what we're doing."