For students in college, going home is often a forced chore, put on only to appease parents. But it’s difficult to underestimate just how much a little home cooking can do.

The Massachusetts volleyball team (12-11, 5-8 Atlantic 10) used some home cooking of its own, absolutely demolishing Rhode Island last night at the Curry Hicks Cage. The Minutewomen dismissed the visiting Rams (13-10, 9-4 A-10) in three sets (30-16, 30-19, 30-18), dominating for the entire match, allowing their visitors to own just one lead in any game. It marked the third straight loss for Rhody, who went into this past weekend riding a 10-match winning streak.

“I haven’t seen that team in a long time,” said UMass Head Coach Bonnie Kenny, in reference to her team’s stellar performance. “I’m really proud of them. I thought we did a very good job. Obviously our offense was on fire. It’s the best we’ve served all year and I just thought we stayed very disciplined on defense. Our block was excellent – we had nine blocks, but what people don’t realize is that we channeled balls and dug a lot of balls.”

The Maroon and White attack hit an astronomical .370 for the match, totaling a mere nine errors, with just four coming in the first two games.

“They had a lot more errors than we did,” Kenny said. “Nine hitting errors – that’s got to be a record this year.”

Duly impressive for UMass was its serving prowess, as the team put up 10 aces for the match with only three errors – an impressive feat for a team averaging 1.8 aces per game – with co-captain Lymarie Llovet leading the team with four aces.

“I thought our offense worked really well for us tonight,” said UMass co-captain Janeen DeMarte, who put up 10 kills – a stark contrast to her mere two errors in the match. “Our setter found holes for us that we were able to hit between and it just worked really well. We clicked better than we have in a while.”

The UMass offense received contributions from every part of the court, with three attackers, DeMarte, Llovet and sophomore Nitia Small – posting 10 or more kills for the three-game set. Additionally, every Minutewoman who attempted a kill posted a hitting percentage of .200 or better.

“I thought every single person that played tonight was great offensively,” Kenny said. “Our middles – Celia [Wiste] and Clare [Baxter] – might not have had as many sets, but they held [URI’s] middle blockers. Their middle blockers respected them enough that our outside attack had one-on-ones.”

On the other side of the ball, the Maroon and White was equally spectacular, with the blockers – especially Wiste and Baxter – shutting down URI’s offensive weapons.

“Defense starts with the block and the block was channeling the ball really well to the deep court, so it was easier for us to play defense,” DeMarte said.

“I thought we did a great job on the block,” Kenny said. “When [Rhode Island] can do what they want to do, they do it very well. When you stop them and prevent them from doing what they want to do, they don’t really have a lot of different outlets.”

What the success on the block equated to was a tremendous performance in defense of the Ram spikers. The team posted 55 digs, with co-captains DeMarte and Llovet leading the way, with 16 and 13, respectively.

“I thought that we knew Rhode Island well enough that we could defend them,” Kenny said. “I can’t say that I thought it would be this easy, but I’m glad it was.”

One of the many keys to victory for the Minutewomen was a quick start, something that they have failed to see many times this season. In the first game, they jumped all over the Rams, coming out of the gates to a 10-2 lead. Games two and three saw similar results to start sets, with the Maroon and White getting out to 10-6 and 12-6 leads in the two stanzas.

“The games that we’ve lost before were the games that we were five points down and couldn’t get ourselves up at the beginning,” DeMarte said. “This game, we started off really strong, so it wasn’t really hard to win.”

Putting up a conference win at home should certainly be a momentum boost for the Minutewomen, as they approach yet another conference weekend, with games at George Washington on Friday and at Fordham on Sunday.

“We have a chance to finish the season out and be .500, overall and in the conference, so we just need to keep plugging away and fighting,” Kenny said. “I think that they feel pretty good about how they played tonight. We’ve prepared hard to have a match like this and I’m glad that they finally put it together and did it on the floor.”