CALGARY — The Winnipeg Wesmen certainly didn't look the part of an underdog Friday night.

For the final three sets, that is. 

The No. 7-seed Wesmen men's volleyball team opened the Canada West conference post-season with an impressive 3-1 (12-25, 25-22, 25-18, 25-18) win over the No. 2-seed Mount Royal Cougars in the first match of a best-of-three quarter-final series. 

The Wesmen can finish the series out and move to the conference Final Four with a win in Match 2, Saturday at 7 p.m. (Canada West TV)

The Cougars, the No. 4-ranked team in the nation who finished the conference season 17-7, set the tone early winning eight out of 10 points to turn a 6-5 lead into a 14-5 advantage and forcing a Wesmen timeout at 16-9.

MRU won the next four points after that and cruised to a first-set win. 

The Wesmen, however, started to flip the match during a key point in the second set. Winnipeg trailed 16-5, but won the next three points and, after MRU pulled to 19-18 down, the Wesmen won three of the next four.

In Set 3, the Wesmen won seven straight points to take a 10-7 advantage and turn it into a 14-7 edge. They pulled a similar run off to start the fourth, as well, winning the first seven points of the set and eventually stretching that to 19-9, a buffer that was enough to ward off an inspired Cougars rally as they got as close as 21-17.

The Cougars, the top attacking team by percentage in the country at .309, was held to under .100 in both the third and fourth sets and hit .220 for the match.

The Wesmen had a season-high 17 total blocks. 

Winnipeg's top three attackers fuelled its offence accounting for 36 of the team's 47 kills. Fifth-year senior Nigel Nielsen had 14 kills, Isaiah Olfert had 12 and Liam Kristjanson 10. The three of them combined to make just nine errors on 65 swings and each hit better than .400. 

 The Wesmen hit .427 as a team, the third time this season they've hit better than .400 and the first time since a three-set win over UBC, Nov. 4.