Taryn Kloth and the Jays were ready for Marquette on Sunday (Spomer / WBR) $CLICK TO BUY$
Ever since the Big East released their preseason volleyball coaches’ poll, the eyes of Creighton players have lit up like Christmas morning at every mention of Marquette. Although it was hardly a unanimous decision, the league coaches ultimately picked the Golden Eagles as the favorites to win the regular season championship in 2018 despite the Bluejays having a four-year stranglehold on that title. On Sunday afternoon in front of more than 2,200 fans at D.J. Sokol Arena, the 10th-ranked Jays picked apart their league rivals 25-17, 26-24, and 25-20 to improve to 10-4 on the season and 2-0 in Big East play.
Senior All-American outside hitters Jaali Winters and Taryn Kloth were at their best once again in a big match for the Bluejays. Winters hit .300 and finished with 15 kills and 11 digs, while Kloth led all players with a .464 attack percentage and matched Marquette’s Allie Barber — last season’s Big East Player of the Year, and the preseason favorite to win it in 2018 — for the match lead in kills with 16.
“[Jaali and Taryn] did a great job of stepping up as senior leaders in a big match,” Creighton coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “They carried a lot of load. This was a big match not only because Marquette is a great team and a great resume builder, but this was a big match as we work toward a goal of trying to win [the Big East]. We’ve got lots of matches before we’ll face them again that we’ll have to be clean in, because they are going to get better.”
The 21st-ranked Golden Eagles led 1-0, 2-1, and 3-2 in the early moments of the match, but that was about it for set one. Freshman outside hitter Jaela Zimmerman put down a kill to tie things up. Winters followed with a kill of her own, and the Bluejays never trailed the rest of the way. For her part, Kloth caught fire and finished with eight kills on 12 swings in game. Allie Barber wasn’t far behind the Creighton All-American with six kills on 12 swings, but CU held the rest of her teammates to just 9 kills on 32 attacks as they out-hit Marquette .439 to .273 in the 25-17 game one win.
Jaali Winters led the Jays on Sunday in the win over Marquette (Spomer / WBR) $CLICK TO BUY$
Kloth stayed sharp with five kills on eight swings in the second set, but the Bluejays needed some help from their newcomers to rally late in the game. After a service error cut Marquette’s lead to 23-22, freshman middle blocker Annika Welty went behind the line and served over an ace to tie it up, then took the Golden Eagles out of system with her next serve leading to a combo block of Barber by Zimmerman and redshirt junior Megan Ballenger. Welty’s next serve had a little too much zip on it and went long to make it 24-24, but Zimmerman got CU back to set point at 25-24 with a kill before an attack by Marquette’s Hope Werch went wide to give the Bluejays a 2-0 lead at intermission.
“We were trying to get them out of system, because I think Barber was up at that point, so you knew the ball was going there,” Booth said of her team’s late rally just before the break. “I thought the big part of that run was Annika getting them out of system — that ace was big — and disrupting them a little bit from the service line.”
To jump-start the Jays in set three, Welty and junior setter Madelyn Cole teamed up for a pair of ace blocks against Barber to push Creighton out to a 4-0 lead, and they never gave it up after that. Winters put the match on ice with seven kills on 13 swings in game three as the Jays out-hit Marquette .324 to .139 in a set that featured no ties or lead changes.
It wasn’t just the Jaali and Taryn show on Sunday, either. The Bluejays got 20 swings apiece out of Zimmerman and Ballenger with the true freshman producing seven kills, while Ballenger added six. Cole finished with a match-high 38 assists to go along with 12 digs as she and Winters produced the match’s only double-doubles. Defensively, the Bluejays got key contributions from junior libero Brittany Witt who ended up leading all players with 19 digs, while Welty added five blocks to go along with her match-high three aces. Up and down the roster, Creighton looked locked in from the very first serve, and it showed throughout the three sets it took them to earn the victory.
Creighton won the challenges at the net (Spomer / WBR) $CLICK TO BUY$
“Everyone will ask if we are ready before a match and I’ll always tell them ‘I don’t know, we’ve done our job to a degree,'” Booth said. “But this team has proven it. There was one match [this year] where they laid an egg, but other than that, they have performed every time they’ve stepped on the court. We haven’t won every match, but they’ve come out and played hard. I didn’t question whether we would come out and be focused and ready to go. I think we’ve got great leadership … but these are the easy ones to get up for. It’s a great team. They are definitely our conference rival. We know they want to beat us just as we want to beat them. I knew we would show up. I didn’t know if we’d win, but I knew we’d show up.”
To no one’s surprise, Jaali Winters was more confident in the outcome in response to her head coach. However, she added that the performance was motivated more by where they want to be at the end of the season as opposed to what the any of the other coaches in the league thought about them in the preseason.
“It’s something that is always in the back of our heads that they were chosen first,” Winters said. “But today was more about us and focusing on our game. They are a really good team. Knowing that they were ranked 21 and we’re 10, we wanted to keep our ranking and make sure that we kept rolling.”
See more photos from the match courtesy of Mike Spomer