DENVER— Outside hitters Sierra Hunt and Sydney Leffler combined for 38 kills but were not quite enough to stop a balanced Regis University Ranger attack that had five players combine for 56 of the Rangers' 60 kills in a 5-set Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference thriller between two of the top 15 teams in the country on Saturday afternoon here at the Regis Field House.
 
Hunt finished with a season-high 21 kills and hit .326 while Leffler had 17 kills on .412 hitting in the CMU defeat, which snapped the Mavs' 12-match winning streak.
 
Instead, the nation's 14^th-ranked Rangers claimed a 25-16, 12-25, 13-25, 25-21, 15-10 come-from-behind victory to improve to 20-6 overall and to 16-2 in RMAC play to claim the No. 2 seed in next week's RMAC Tournament.  The No. 15 Mavericks fell to 20-5 overall and to 15-3 and will be the No. 3 seed.
 
If the teams win their respective quarterfinal matches on Thursday, they will meet again on Friday in the semifinal round.
 
The Mavs will play No. 6 seed Colorado Christian for the third time this season while Regis will play the No. 7 seed, which will be South Dakota Mines, UCCS or Fort Lewis pending later Saturday evening results.
 
The Mavericks finished with the slightest of edges in team hitting percentage, outhitting the Rangers .279 to .276 throughout the match.  They also had a 63-60 edge in total kills and a 57-53 edge in total digs but could not put away the Rangers, who hit .542 in the fourth set and .500 in the decisive fifth set.
 
The Mavs committed seven hitting errors in the opening set but dominated the second and third, hitting an errorless .609 in the second before clicking to a .294 rate in the third.  The Rangers were held to .053 and .059 figures in the CMU set wins, which saw the Mavericks double-up the Rangers in total points.
 
Maverick right side Erin Curl finished with nine kills in the first four sets although the Mavericks controlled the normally dominate CMU middles, Tye Wedhorn and Savannah Spitzer, who were each held to five kills.
 
Nadine Burbrink and Klaudia Sowizral finished with 12 kills each to lead the Rangers.
 
Maverick setter Sabrina VanDeList finished with 46 assists while libero Kerstin Layman led three Mavericks in double-figures on the back row with 18 digs.  Hahni Johnson recorded a career-high 11 while Maddi Foutz added 10.
 
Leffler also had four blocks to pace the Mavs in that category.
 
After trailing for much of the fourth set, the Mavericks got out to a 4-3 lead in the fifth set before the Rangers roared back to take the next six points, three on Sowizral kills, and a 9-4 lead.
 
The Mavs did close to within three at 10-7 on back-to-back Leffler kills but could get no closer as a kill by Burbrink and two more by Theis helped the Rangers double the lead to six at 13-7 before later finishing off the match.
 
Stay tuned to www.rmacsports.org and www.cmumavericks.com for the RMAC Tournament bracket and match times.  The tournament will be hosted by top-seed and RMAC regular season champion MSU Denver in the Auraria Event Center, Thursday through next Saturday (Nov. 10-12).