Creighton’s service line performance was a big factor in the win on Sunday vs. DePaul. Lydia Dimke prepares to serve (Spomer / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
Entering Sunday afternoon’s match against DePaul, Kirsten Bernthal Booth had an inkling that her team’s performance behind the service line would be the most important ingredient in the recipe for success. What she didn’t anticipate, though, was that her Bluejays would drop 12 aces while committing only four errors against the Blue Demons over the course of a 25-15, 29-31, 25-21, 25-17 four-set win in front of just shy of 800 fans at D.J. Sokol Arena.
“That’s an incredible stat,” the Creighton coach said of her team’s dominance behind the end line. “We knew we really wanted to be aggressive with our serving against DePaul, so that was good to see.”
On most days, the Blue Demons’ 10 aces and nine errors would stand out in their favor, but the Bluejays, especially Megan Ballenger, were on another level all afternoon from the service line. The red-shirt freshman from Ankeny, Iowa had a season-high six aces without committing a single error.
“We knew we had to serve tough to get them out of system, so they would be forced to go to their outsides,” Ballenger said. “That was big.”
Creighton hit .291 as a team for the match, including a .417 clip in game one that featured a fast start, a strong finish, and some tense moments in between. After DePaul took an early 2-1 lead, senior specialist Amanda Foje served up a 7-0 run for Creighton that was keyed by a couple of stuffs from junior middle blocker Marysa Wilkinson. The Blue Demons regrouped with a timeout and used an 8-3 run to pull within one at 11-10, but Ballenger dropped in her first two aces of the match and sophomore outside hitter Jaali Winters added one of her own to spark a 14-5 response from the Bluejays to close out set one.
DePaul bounced back to take game two thanks to a .279 attack percentage. It was the only set all day where they out-hit Creighton. Junior outside hitter Myah Reed and sophomore right side Brittany Maxwell had four kills apiece in the second game to lead Blue Demons, while junior middle blocker Caitlyn Coffey and freshman middle blocker Claire Anderson each add three of their own. Reed, who led the team with 14 kills on the day, was particularly effective late in game two, along with Anderson and Maxwell to help steal the set.
Anderson saved set point at 24-23 and again at 25-24 when she answered kills by Wilkinson, who tied Reed with a match-high 14 kills, and Bluejay sophomore outside hitter Taryn Kloth. Reed then went kill for kill with Wilkinson to save set points at 26-25 and 27-26 before Maxwell finished the set with a block and a kill to tie the match at 1-1 heading into intermission.
“I thought DePaul gave us a lot of fits,” Booth said. “It was kind of different than we anticipated. We were really keyed on their right side and middles — I thought their middles also had success, but Reed really tore us up. We had no answer for her, and we weren’t necessarily prepared for that set distribution to happen.”
“I was disappointed that we never really contained her, so we’ll have to go back to film and figure out why we had such trouble getting her. I thought she did a really nice job of going after our hands and finding small little gaps that were left in our block.”
The set-two loss snapped Creighton’s streak of consecutive sets won at home in Big East regular-season play at 22. Before Sunday they hadn’t lost a set at home to a Big East foe in the regular season since October 9th of last season when they dropped the first and second set against these very same Blue Demons before bouncing back to win the final three games after intermission.
The Bluejays repeated that performance on Sunday by taking each of the next two games to close out the match. After allowing DePaul to hit .280 and .279 respectively in the first two games, they held the visitors from Chicago to an .095 attack percentage in the final two sets while posting a .283 mark on their end over that span.
“We just knew we had to bounce,” Ballenger said of the team’s mindset going into the locker room tied. “That’s what we do. Coming back from that there was nothing else to do — just compete and play a little bit better than we had in the second set.”
“It’s about finding a way to win. It’s not going to be pretty every night, and you’re not going to do everything you want to, but I thought we followed our plan. We kind of strayed away from it, but then got back on what the coaches wanted us to do blocking-wise and offensively. That really helped us out in the long run.”
Megan Ballenger went on a 12-0 serving run that took the wind out of DePaul’s sails. (Streur / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
Creighton led nearly wire to wire in game three to take a 2-1 lead in the match, but fell behind 6-3 in the early going in set four. Then came a kill by senior middle blocker Lauren Smith, which handed the ball to Megan Ballenger to serve for Creighton. By the time her final turn behind the service line ended her team had gone from trailing 6-4 to leading 16-6, DePaul had blown both of their timeouts, and she had double her total number of aces on the day from three to six. The Blue Demons didn’t get any closer than seven points the rest of the way after Ballenger’s 12-0 serving run.
“I honestly didn’t know how many I had served [in a row],” she said. “I just tried to make good contact with the ball and it worked.”
What most impressed her head coach about the match-clinching run was that DePaul had to earn their way out of it on a kill by Anderson instead of Ballenger letting them off the hook with an error.
“One thing that I think is impressive is we’ve talked about once you start a run like that you want to make sure that they end the run by getting a kill,” Booth said. “Once Megan got passed three serves to some degree — I didn’t say it to her particularly, but you want to make sure she doesn’t miss at that point, because that’s when teams start to feel pressure.”
“Sometimes what you see from servers is they think they’ve scored a lot and that they can serve harder, and then they make an error. I really like that Megan just stuck with what she was doing, kind of put the same tempo serve in over and over again, and really disrupted them until they finally earned their way out of it.”
The Bluejays improved to 8-6 on the season and 2-0 in Big East play with the win, while the Blue Demons fell to 7-7 overall and 1-1 in the Big East. Creighton will now play eight of their next ten matches away from Omaha beginning with a Friday night contest against Xavier in Cincinnati, Ohio. First serve is scheduled for 6:00 p.m.