As a former assistant volleyball coach at St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Dillon Taylor had a good idea of the challenge his team faced in Tuesday night's home doubleheader against the 16-4 Pomeroys.

Even in a pair of four-set losses, the Griz men's coach was pretty happy with how his team faced it.

"When you're looking at that program versus our program, different levels, different builds," Taylor said. "But I thought that, for our group being as young as we are, as inexperienced as we are, we saw a lot of growth throughout the match. ... Just get better every set. Here's set one, that's your baseline; now get better at something. We got better at that, now let's get better at something else.

"I thought that the guys did a really, really great job of just trying to control our side. We put the block in the right places, and we gave ourselves the matchups; we were finding ways to score."

The Pomeroys overwhelmed the Grizzlies early in the first match, rolling to a 25-12 win in set one and following with a 25-17 victory in the second. But Franklin (4-14) showed some grit in the third set, scoring four straight points to take an 8-5 lead and holding the visitors off the rest of the way. George had kills on two of the last three Griz points to finish it off at 25-20.

St. Mary-of-the-Woods ended the opener with a 25-17 win in the fourth.

The nightcap proved more competitive throughout. Franklin dropped the first set 25-20 before punching back with a 26-24 triumph in the second to even the match. Down 23-19, the Grizzlies shifted the momentum with a kill and a service ace from Kevin Braxton, and a Jonathan McCoy kill fought off one set point before three straight SMWC errors allowed the home team to come out on top.

Though Franklin lost the last two sets by scores of 25-18 and 25-20, Taylor liked a lot of what he saw. The Grizzlies had 45 kills in the second match and 82 overall, showing plenty of firepower against a very strong Pomeroys team.

For the night, Demetric George led the Grizzlies with 25 kills, followed by McCoy with 18. Matthew Becerra totaled 51 assists and Simon Hmung finished with 21 digs. Franklin only committed four service errors in the second match, something that had hampered the team in several early-season matches.

"Our defense is starting to work," Taylor said. "We're getting offense out of — we played six primary attackers tonight, and all six of them got involved in big moments, so I'm really happy with that. I'm really happy with the growth and the direction that we're taking these things."

The Grizzlies will try to continue moving in the right direction on Thursday, when they host Defiance in a 7 p.m. match at the Spurlock Center.