There is nothing that can be done to take this away from them. This year’s volleyball team is permanently engraved into the NIU record books.

Tieing the 1992 and ‘93 team records for the longest win-streak of all time, the 2001 Huskies have accumulated, after this weekend’s wins, 15 wins in a row.

“I’m very excited about the win streak,” setter Jenny Bowman said. “I think we’re peaking at the right time in our season and we’ve just really been pulling together and everything started to fall into place when the streak started.”

While it is a record that will go down in history, coach Todd Kress is trying to downplay the winning streak to his players.

“He tells us not to think about the winning streak, but it is nice to know that we’ve won that many in a row,” said outside hitter Tera Lobdell.

“The reason I don’t like talking about the streak is because I feel that it just puts undue pressure on the kids,” said Kress. “We don’t need to focus on that. We just need to focus on winning and winning well.”

With the players aware that both wins this weekend would tie the record, it wasn’t their main concern, as two tough opponents stood in their way.

The Huskies faced Ball State on Friday, who had the best record in the Mid-American Conference going into the game.

After expending so much emotion against Ball State, the Huskies wanted to make sure that they did not overlook Western Michigan on Saturday night.

“We weren’t necessarily worried about a let-down, but our goal was to come out with the same amount of emotion as we did [against Ball State],” said Bowman. “We knew it would be harder because we were a little more tired and a lot of emotion was spent against Ball State, but our big goal was just to come out and play aggressive and play with as much emotion.”

After overcoming Ball State 3-0, they went on to pull a double sweep and send Western Michigan home early Saturday night.

After the two wins, the team has four more games until the MAC playoffs.

“Hopefully, by the time tournament time comes around, we’ll be at full blast and on top of our game,” said Bowman.

While Kress doesn’t want this streak to distract his players and what their objectives should be, he knows that it is something for them to be proud of.

“I am so happy for our kids that when all is said and done and it goes in the history books, those kids can talk about it and say, ‘Hey, I was a part of that. I was a part of something great at that university and in that program,'” Kress said.

“Whether or not we break [the record] on Tuesday night or not, that is insignificant at this point. I’m very happy for the kids though, because they take a lot of pride in that.”