During any championship season, a team can point to one particular moment when everything came together and a title moved from a thought to a goal.

The A&M Consolidated volleyball team may have had that moment in the second game of its first match of the year, as the Lady Tigers crushed 10th-ranked College Park 25-21, 25-9, 25-21 on Tuesday at Tigerland Gym.

"It's a nice way to open the season against a good opponent," Consol head coach Cydryce McMillian said. "I enjoyed seeing that second game, where we saw that spark of excellence. We got rid of some of the nerves from the first, settled down and got in sync. We really started looking like a championship team. Now, it's a matter of getting back into the gym and fine-tuning it so we can play at that level consistently."

The Lady Tigers got outstanding play from three-year starters like Erika Arthur and Julia Westerbur and seniors like Ashten Landry and Emily Nixon. The run in the Game 2 was more about the team than any one player, as teammate after teammate picked up kills, digs and assists.

Arthur opened the game with two kills and a block in the first seven points, but Landry, Westerbur and junior Jaclyn Roddy combined for five straight kills in the middle of Game 2. That run pushed Consol to an 11-point lead and kept College Park back on its heels.

Landry started the streak with a kill to make it 11-4. On the next point, both teams traded long rallies as College Park made a couple of nice saves to keep the volley alive. Westerbur tried to end the point with a quick dink over the net, but the College Park defenders were quick to dig it out and send it weakly back over the net. This time Westerbur put some authority on the ball, sending it empathetically toward the floor. Landry added two more kills before Roddy finished the run with a nice cross-court hit.

"Julia and Erika have been the core of our offense for the past three years," McMillian said. "We sent a lot of balls to the outside because our passing was generally off the net. All our outside hitters took a lot of good swings."

It was an unusually sloppy game for such a highly ranked team like College Park. The Lady Cavaliers never seemed to get into a rhythm, and twice teammates ran into each other. The second time resulted in a rolled ankle for one of the players.

Further, College Park suffered through a number of net violations and even a rotation violation, giving Consol too many points in the first and third games. Consol avoided those kinds of mistakes for the most part, though McMillian was critical of the team's service errors in Game 3.

Arthur led the Lady Tigers in kills with 11. The senior also added three blocks and one ace. Landry had nine kills and a block while Westerbur added eight kills and three blocks. Jessica Wagner added five kills and Roddy had three.