As clean and aggressive as Creighton was on Friday night against Villanova, they were the polar opposite for much of the afternoon on Sunday. The 14th-ranked Bluejays committed far too many service errors and struggled to settle into a rhythm offensively, but in the end the made fewer mistakes than Georgetown to come away with a 25-14, 25-18, 20-25, 25-18 win in four sets in front of the 1,800-plus fans in attendance at D.J. Sokol Arena.
Creighton (9-3, 2-0 Big East) hit below .200 in the first and third sets, and after a strong start from the service line, committed 10 errors against just two aces over the final two games to make life harder on themselves that it needed to be.
“That was a pretty disappointing match,” Creighton head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “Probably the most disappointed I’ve been after a match maybe thus far for the entirety. Even after game one I was pretty disappointed with the way we played. I thought Georgetown gave us that game.
“Now it’s about what we learn from it. That’s the positive of this is we’ve got several new kids on the court, so it’s about understanding that if you don’t respect everybody — and it’s not that Georgetown’s record isn’t good, because it is, but they’re not a traditional power and I’m not sure we gave them the respect that they deserved.
“If this was on the road we would have lost this match, so now the challenge is what we can learn from this. We had a match like this last year at Xavier where we barely came back and won in five, and it kicked us in the teeth and was good for us. This is an early wake up call to hopefully make sure that we have our mojo every single night.”
Senior outside hitter Iva Vujosevic got the Hoyas (11-5, 1-1 Big East) off to a strong start by going after high hands on her first two swings to put Creighton in a 4-1 hole in the first set, but the Bluejays were able to dig out of it thanks some block touches by junior middle blocker Naomi Hickman. Aggressive and accurate serving prevented Georgetown out of system, which ignited a 15-3 run for the home team courtesy of one error after another.
Creighton only hit .160 as a team, but 19 errors all together — eight attacking, six serving, two each blocking and ball handling, and one receiving — by the Hoyas allowed CU to cruise to a 25-14 win.
The pins carried a lot of load for a much sharper offensive performance in game two. Redshirt freshman Keeley Davis, sophomore Jaela Zimmerman, and junior Erica Kostelac each had three kills as Creighton hit .346 and sided out at 77% in a 25-18 game-two victory to a take a 2-0 match lead at the break.
Games three and four weren’t as pretty, however. The Bluejays sided out at just 58%, mostly due to the fact that they committed 10 errors on their final 45 serves. Fortunately for the Bluejays, their fifth-year Steady Eddy senior Megan Ballenger flipped her switch to “angry” to pull her team out of the rut. Over the last two sets, Ballenger recorded seven of her 10 kills and three of her four blocks. She finished the match with a .625 hitting percentage and was the only hitter for CU not to commit an attack error.
“We got the ball to her more,” Booth said. “I think she was displaying confidence with what she was doing. She was being assertive with her approach, and that’s one of the things that we talked about is that last step close has to be really assertive. I think, and I said this in the locker room, Megan showed that she’s a veteran. She didn’t get nervous in that situation, she got mad. That led to her being more aggressive as opposed to getting a little bit passive. Hopefully others will learn from that.”
One younger player who appeared to follow that lead was Davis. After Ballenger went after high hands to give Creighton a 21-16 lead in game four, Davis closed the show with a kill on each of the team’s final four points to finish with a team-best 13 for the match.
“At times I feel like she loses her confidence a little bit and then gets it back pretty quickly,” Ballenger said. “I just try to make her confident and yell. She said to me today that it helps her when I yell at her to swing at a ball out of system, and I was like ‘ok, I’ll yell at you to do that or I’ll yell at you to block.’ Either way, taking the pressure off of her is kind of what she needs. She just needs to be confident, because she plays really well when she does that. I think you can see that swagger come out.”
At the end of the day, a win is a win, but the coaches and the veteran players know that they can’t rely on being able to flip the switch when things get a little dicey, especially with six of their eight matches in the month of October are coming away from their home arena.
“Today we just didn’t have a ton of energy going into the match,” senior libero Brittany Witt said. “We always talk about how we play a lot better with energy, and on the road there obviously won’t be as many fans there cheering for us, so we’re going to have to create it even more. I just think going into the next weekend we know we have to be focused and we have to bring that energy ourselves, because if we are down like we were today we won’t really have those fans there to give that to us.”