After seven road games and two cancellations, the No. 11 Penn State men's volleyball team was happy to be back in Rec Hall for their first home game of the season.

The Nittany Lions(4-3, 1-0 EIVA) celebrated their return to State College by sweeping their match against Rutgers-Newark 3-0 (30-25,30-27,30-27).

"It was nice to finally get off the road," Penn State junior middle hitter Keith Kowal said. "It was just nice to have the home crowd be us."

The Lions got the excitement started by opening with an 8-3 run that included three powerful kills between Kowal and outside hitter Matt Proper. The Lions were cruising along until the final game when Rutgers held it biggest lead of the match at 18-14. Penn State outlasted Rutgers and took the game on a kill by 6-foot-9 sophomore middle hitter Nate Meerstien.

"I thought we played a real patient game," Penn State men's volleyball coach Mark Pavlik said. "I thought offensively, except for that six-point-run by them, we stuck to our game plans really well."

Pavlik said the game plan on offense was to set up Meerstien and sophomore outside hitter Kevin Wentzel to spread out Rutgers' block. Apparently it worked because Wentzel ended up with 15 kills and only three errors, while Meerstien had 11 kills with two errors.

"[Wenzel] was pretty consistent tonight," Pavlik said. "We know how fast Wentz can get to the pin and hit that go-set and we thought we could take advantage of Rutgers block with this. If we can get him hitting .444 with three errors from the right side then we will have teams shifting their block over and giving Keith and Meers [Meerstien] better looks. It opens things up for our whole offense."

On the defensive side, Penn State was able to keep Rutgers' offensive leader, outside hitter Brian Honsberger, relatively silent. Honsberger only had five kills in 17 attempts for a .118 hitting percentage, all below his averages. The Lions got their hands on most of the Raiders' attempts and allowed them very few clean kills.

"[Against Honsberger] we present a little bigger, more experienced block than he is used to," Pavlik said. " I think we never let him get comfortable."