Ava Martin had 13 kills on Friday night (Spomer / WBR)
Kirsten Bernthal Booth is well aware of how potent St. John’s can be when they get flowing early in a match. After all, the Red Storm are the only reason that her Creighton program has won 10 consecutive regular season championships in the Big East, but only four straight conference tournament titles.
On Friday night in Creighton’s home gym, the Johnnies tried to reenact that 2019 Big East Tournament semifinal upset. They even used a 7-0 run to build an 8-3 lead out of the gate in the first set to force Booth to burn a very rare early timeout. The Jays responded by winning nine of the next 12 rallies and only trailed one more time at any point the rest of the match en route to a 25-20, 25-18, 25-18 sweep to improve their overall record to 20-2 and keep their conference mark perfect at 11-0.
CU hit .297 for the match, finishing with a sub-.300 attack percentage for only the second time in league play this season but got enough offensive production behind 13 kills apiece from outside hitters Norah Sis and Ava Martin, plus eight more on 13 error-less swings out of opposite hitter Elise Goetzinger to outkill the Red Storm 46-29 and earn their 13th consecutive win in a choppy, but still relatively comfortable fashion.
“It was a tough match to get a lot of rhythm for a couple of reasons,” Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “I thought there were lots of challenges. We missed a ton of serves, and so I just thought some of that disrupted some flow. I thought our defense was really good blocking-wise and I thought we made some good digs. But I thought we gave up too many runs and just need to be a little bit more consistent.”
The Bluejays held St. John’s a season-low .051 attack percentage. Top attackers Erin Jones, Giorgia Walther, and Lucrezia Lodi entered the day averaging 9.23 kills per set, but were limited to just 6.67 kills per set and a .000 attack percentage on 78 combined swings. Senior middle blocker Kiara Reinhardt played a big part in that with 10 blocks, finishing just one back of a career-high that she set back in April of her freshman season.
Kiara Reinhardt helped lead the Jays on Friday night (Spomer / WBR)
“Kiara is obviously a great blocker, but I think she’s got a really high IQ to what the situation is,” Booth said. “St. John’s had some tendencies, and she is someone that is like okay, this is the player, I know where she’s going to go. Some teams do a whole variety of things. With St. John’s we just needed to stop what they do really well. Kiara is a really high IQ player, she’s big, she’s disciplined. she you know. We knew St. John’s was going to challenge the block out-of-system over and over. Some teams will tip or roll. St. John’s going to hit hard. If you leave a little crack, they are going to bust through. Kiara is really good at getting hip to hip, and making the wall that’s going to be really difficult to get around.”
Creighton finished the night with 12 ace blocks as a team to go along with 54 digs to round out a stifling defensive performance against a team that featured two of the top eight kills leader in Big East play in Jones and Walther.
“When we played them out in New York they burned us a couple times when we weren’t over and low,” Reinhardt said. “We made a big focus on that this week of getting closed and making good setups. I think that really helped us tonight across the board. I felt like a lot of people were more aggressive with their block setups and just went after it. I feel like our defensive work around it too helped us get a lot of good touches.”
While Creighton struggled to get into a rhythm attacking off of their serve receive, they were efficient in turning defense into offense. They finished with a .364 attack percentage in dig transition compared to just .034 for St. John’s. Overall, CU got 31 of their 46 kills in that phase of the game on the night. Junior outside hitter Ava Martin was especially terminal in this area, finishing with 11 of her 13 kills on .476 hitting on transition attacks as she mixed up her shots and tempo to consistently find the floor on the other side of the net.
“I think that’s a strength that Ava has is she has a ton of shots in her arsenal,” her senior All-American setter Kendra Wait said. “As we move into the second half of the season, teams are able to go back and watch how they defended us before, so we’re expecting these teams to come out and play a little bit differently, maybe set up a little differently. To be able to have someone like Ava that can go out there and see the adjustment and go to a different shot, it’s really, really nice. I mean, even Norah was still able to find her different shots. But Ava really stepped up and got the back row attack going. She was lethal out of the back row there at the end in going up and finding holes and putting that ball away.”
Kendra Wait made some history on Friday night (Juszyk / WBR)
Speaking of Wait, it was another historic night at the office for the reigning Big East Player and Setter of the Year. Along with four kills of her own and just seven attempts, the 5-foot-10 senior also tallied 36 assists and 10 digs to record the 66th double-double of her colorful Creighton career. In the process, she broke Melissa Weisensee’s program record that was set back in 1997, a few years before Wait was even born.
The first three words out of Kirsten Bernthal Booth’s mouth summed up the feat as appropriately as one can at this point whenever they are asked about something Wait has accomplished.
“I’m not surprised.”
“Kendra can get a double-double in a lot of different categories,” Booth added. Obviously, the low-hanging fruit is digs and assists, but sometimes I’m sure she’s been there with kills and blocks. She’s a special player. She has some great pieces around her, but there’s no question that she does special things — those numbers don’t just come to everybody.”