During Creighton’s NCAA Tournament Selection Show watch party downtown at DJ’s Dugout last Sunday night, the only reaction from Creighton’s team section when Minnesota’s name was revealed to round out the Omaha regional came from Norah Sis. The two-time All-American outside hitter missed the first matchup between the two teams earlier this season — a five-set win by the Bluejays in Minneapolis — while recovering from an abdominal strain that caused her to miss five weeks and 11 matches. When the Golden Gophers popped up on the screen, the junior out of Papillion shouted, “YES!” and pumped her fists. On Saturday night — in front of the third-largest crowd ever to watch a volleyball match at D.J. Sokol Arena — she made up for lost time with a match-leading 16 kills — including several clutch ones in the second and third sets — to go along with nine digs, two blocks, and the best part: the first trip to the Sweet 16 in her already decorated career and Creighton’s first since 2016.
“I was just excited to see their name up there,” Sis said. “It’s really fun to know that every single game in this tournament we’re going to be playing someone really good. And we’re all in the Midwest, so it’s all familiar teams … and to get a team that we did beat previously this season, to do it again makes it that much sweeter.”
With injuries to Sis, senior libero Ellie Bolton, and a handful of other key contributors over the past three months, lost time has the theme of the season for these Jays. They made up for a different kind of it on Saturday night. For starters, the matchup with Minnesota marked the fourth time the two sides have met in the NCAA Tournament — the most of any opponent that Creighton has squared off with in the postseason. The previous three instances came in 2010, 2012, and 2019. All of them went down in Minneapolis, and all of them went down the same way — with the Gophers advancing and the Jays going home.
On top of that, Minnesota head coach Keegan Cook was the man in charge at Washington in 2018 when the Huskies ended the careers of Jaali Winters and Taryn Kloth in the second round in Omaha.
And on top of THAT, Creighton earned the right to host four of the past five seasons but failed, for a variety of reasons, to extend their season beyond the opening weekend of the tournament.
That’s lost time they can’t recover, but they did maybe redeem by sweeping the Golden Gophers 25-21, 25-20, 29-27 to win their 16th straight match and improve to 29-4 on a season that extends into the second week of December for just third time in program history. All week long and perhaps even overlapping from season to season as the early exits and devastating losses on their home court piled up, it felt as if the team was combating that pressure and that history as much as any opponent. Those losses sting, that feeling hurts. When Ellie Bichelmeyer’s match-clinching kill, which was followed by a delayed celebration after Cook challenged the play, that pain was replaced by joy, and that joy was displayed — for the first time — in front of Creighton’s fans instead of someone else’s.
“I was thinking about that today,” 21-year head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “We have such incredible fans, and we haven’t done it for them … it means a lot to be here and advance. It was fun to do it at [Kansas in 2016] and at [North Carolina in 2015], but it was special to do it here. And it’s different than the Big East championships. Those are incredible, but the ‘Dance’ is when you want to keep playing, so it means a great deal.”
The first set had four ties, but the only time Creighton trailed at all was on the first rally after a Phoebe Awoleye kill gave Minnesota a 1-0 lead. Sis and senior middle blocker Kiara Reinhardt followed that with kills and the Bluejays never trailed the rest of the way. Of Creighton’s 25 points in set one, 19 of them came on kills as they outpaced the Gophers offensively .283 to .207. Kirsten Bernthal Booth actually brought Sis and fellow six-rotation stud Ava Martin, who each had four kills in the set, off the bench before the first serve. The move that sent a wave of confusion through Minnesota’s coaching staff and players. Booth said afterwards that it was a matchup play designed to align Sis with Lydia Grote, Minnesota’s stud outside hitter who punished the Jays to the tune of 20 kills on just 38 swings back in mid-September.
“When we played her last time, she tore us a new one, and she tore Utah State a new one last night,” Booth said of Grote. “Norah is really good at diving into that seam, and we felt like that’s where Grote loves to [attack] … that was a matchup that we thought could have success.”
Bichelmeyer led all players with five kills in the first set, and she carried that over into set two with another kill and a combo block with Reinhardt to help Creighton open up a 3-0 lead. Minnesota took control after that and led by as much as three points before a Reinhardt serving run sparked a stretch that saw CU take eight of 10 rallies to turn a 14-12 deficit into a 20-16 lead. Senior captain middle blocker Kiana Schmitt pushed the lead to 23-18 with a kill and a block, then Sis and Martin sealed with a back row kill and a termination from the left pin to win it 25-20 and send the Bluejays to the locker room up two sets to none.
The Golden Gophers responded out of the break. They raced out to an 8-4 lead and forced Kirsten Bernthal Booth to burn an early timeout. They led by as much as five and seemed determined to extend the match to a fourth set. That was at least until Kendra Wait — the recently crowned Player of the Year and Setter of the Year in the Big East — decided she wanted to give Creighton it’s 16th sweep in the last 17 matches and called her own number on back-to-back rallies to help trim the deficit to 18-17 and force Keegan Cook to call a timeout to address how to defend CU’s physical, aggressive, and savvy playmaker. That message apparently went in one ear of Minnesota’s players and right out the other before they took the court again, because Wait dumped again on the first rally out of the timeout for another kill to tie things up at 18-all.
“I was just doing what came to my mind in that moment,” Wait said of tide-turning stretch. “It was a lot of just reacting. Our passers did a great job of giving me balls that I could just go up and do things with. I had the full support of my teammates that they were okay with me doing that, so I kind of just said I’m going to go for it and hopefully it works.”
Sis and Bichelmeyer combined for kills on nine of Creighton’s final 11 points to cap the game three comeback and finish off the match. Bichelmeyer terminated the last two balls to end the night with 12 kills, her second-most as a Bluejay after transferring in from Rice for her final season of eligibility.
“I just stuck to what I know,” Bichelmeyer said of her match-clinching kills. “I love the line shot and I love to tool, so that’s what I was going for. On that last ball, I saw the block in front of me so I kind of just closed my eyes and swung for it. My teammates were asking me when [Minnesota] challenged if I saw a touch, but I honestly didn’t know. I was just swinging high and sticking to what I know.”
Along with Sis’ match-high 16 kills and Bichelmeyer’s 12, Martin also ended up in double figures with 15 kills on .286 hitting. Wait packed the stat sheet with 44 assists, 17 digs, five kills, and two blocks to tie a D.J. Sokol Arena record with her 22nd double-double at home. She had 16 assists, 10 digs, and three kills in the third set alone.
Next up for the No. 3 seed Bluejays is a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to face last year’s national runner-up in Louisville. The Cardinals are 24-4 on the season with their only loss out of conference coming in five sets to Stanford. The Jays and Cards will serve things up first to start the Sweet 16 round on Thursday, December 7 at 11:00 a.m. (CT) on ESPN2.