Viking sophomore Nikola Vukicevic (Belgrade, Serbia) landed a spot on the NAIA Men's Volleyball All-America Team released on Thursday.

The 6'6 middle blocker led the inaugural Viking men's volleyball team to a 13-13 overall record in 2012. GV finished 3-7 for fifth place in the MAMVIC West Division.

Vukicevic was among leaders in nine national statistical categories, notably blocks per game (4^th-1.13), hitting percentage (5^th-.407), total blocks (5^th-103), total service aces (6^th-31), total kills (18^th-266), and kills per game (8^th-2.92).
 

Mitchell McPartland is a senior at Boone High School in Boone, Iowa. He served as the manager for the Boone High School Girls' Volleyball team the last three years. Mitchell played club volleyball the last two years for Johnston Volleyball Club, where he was coached by Curt Larkin. He also coached AAU volleyball teams the last two seasons.

Mitchell also plays tennis for Boone High School. He has won over 70 varsity matches the last three years. As a three-time letter winner he was also a part of a team that finished third at the state tournament in 2011, as well as a doubles team that finished fifth in 2011.

Along with sports, Mitchell participates in choir, Swing Choir, Foreign Language Club and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He is a Scholastic Honor Society and National Honor Society member. He plans to major in communications with a focus in public relations and minor in Spanish here at Grand View.

Mitchell is the son of Jim and Heidi McPartland of Boone. He has two siblings, Mariah, 15, and Marcus, 8.  

No. 5 seed Grand View fell to Missouri Baptist in the MAMVIC Conference Tournament. Missouri Baptist won over the Vikings 3-0 (25-16, 25-13, 25-22). This was the final match of the season for the Vikings which wrapped them up at (13-13) overall and (3-7) in the MAMVIC.

The Vikings found themselves winning big matches throughout their first year of competition. In the first half of the year, GV won over nationally-ranked Graceland, St. Ambrose, Warner Southern, Clarke and Cardinal Stritch.  

After the final weekly polls came out on Monday, the Vikings traveled to Missouri Valley, Tuesday, to wrap up the regular season. GV took Missouri Valley to four games but lack of rhythm held the Vikings back from taking over the match. Missouri Valley won 3-1 (25-19, 18-25, 25-21, 25-20).

Grand View struggled to turn freshman, Rody Alicea's sets into constant points, consistently throughout the match. Alicea came off the bench to run an offense for the Vikings and led them with 24 assists, but it wasn't enough for GV to take the win. Nikola Vukicevic hit .412% for the night with 10 kills to finish out the match while Jr. Villafania laid down 13 kills.  

After a win over Hannibal-LaGrange the No. 8 ranked Vikings traveled to Dubuque, Iowa to compete. On Friday night Grand View rolled past Robert Morris in three, winning the match 3-0 (25-16, 25-23, 25-15).

Sophomore, Nikola Vukicevic and freshman Junior Villafania led the Vikings with 12 kills against Robert Morris. Following closely was VJ Gonzalez who had 10 kills and David Holliday wrapped up the match with nine.

Assisting those four Vikings was freshman, Kyle Hanagami, leading the team with 40 assists while Shaun Bissen cleaned up the defense with 12 digs. Vukicevic also hit .500% and added five aces while Villafania hit .450%.

The Vikings second match up was against Cardinal Stritch. "We never got into a rhythm and got off to a really slow start which we were never really able to recover from," said Head Coach Donan Cruz. Grand View fell to Cardinal Stritch 1-3 (13-25, 23-25, 25-19, 19-25).