Creighton got phase three of their season off the ground Friday afternoon when they welcomed DePaul to D.J. Sokol Arena for a Big East Tournament semifinal tilt to decide who earned the opportunity to play for the conference’s automatic bid on Fox Sports 2 on Saturday.
As they have done every match since the third week of September, the Bluejays prevailed in relatively one-sided fashion with a 25-22, 25-19, 25-17 win to eliminate fourth-seeded DePaul and earn a spot in a conference tournament title match for the 12 time in the last 13 years.
CU had some early issues in serve receive and committed a handful of net violations that gave the Blue Demons some free points throughout the first set. Their offense, however, got more terminal as the match wore on and carried the day. Norah Sis and Ava Martin combined for 30 total kills and a .474 attack percentage between them as the Blue Demons had zero answers for Creighton’s star outside hitters.
The Bluejays hit .412 in the first set, .429 in the second, and .485 in the third to outhit DePaul .442 to .194 for the match
“We definitely gave away a lot more points than we normally do,” Sis said. “Hitting at a high clip helped to balance that out a little bit, but that’s probably not ideally what we want to do.”
Norah Sis and Ava Martin continued to do what they have done all season for the Jays (Spomer / WBR)
DePaul recorded three of its first seven points of the first set from the behind the service line of their service aces, then dropped in a fourth one late to take a 20-19 lead and force Creighton head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth to call a timeout.
After regrouping, the Jays got five kills out of Sis and Martin that helped them win six of the next eight rallies to take the set 25-22.
Booth couldn’t specifically recall what she reiterated to her team during that stoppage in play. Some of it was about tactical details, but the mindset part was simple — do what you do.
“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about once both teams are in the 20 zone,” Booth said. “Who are we going to be? Be us. Be aggressive. We’re not going to win matches by being passive.”
Creighton didn’t just apply that mantra to the end of the first, but also in crunch time of the second and third, and anytime they needed a big kill to either gain some momentum or stop DePaul’s. In addition to Sis’ match-high 18 kills and Martin’s 12 on 23 error-free swings, the Jays also six kills apiece from opposite hitters Elise Goetzinger and Jaya Johnson, four kills from newly crowned Big East Player and Setter of the Year Kendra Wait, and three kills from veteran middle blocker Kiara Reinhardt.
That production allowed Creighton to end the match with 49 kills and just seven errors on only 95 attempts.
“Last time we were kind of finding the [libero] a lot,” Martin said. “She would suck in a lot on us, so we talked about really going after deep corners and kind of mixing up our shots and avoiding her, because she’s a good defender. All around the deep corner and that six zone were pretty open. We were just trying to switch it up, go to the donut, different things like that.”
After giving up four aces in the opening set, Creighton didn’t allow anymore the rest of the afternoon. Senior libero Maddy Bilinovic was a perfect 32-for-32 in serve receive. She handled all but 20 of the balls that DePaul servers kept in play.
“[DePaul] had been locking in to serving zone one, so we really talked about it this week in practice,” Martin said. “Maddy did a really good job of being big and covering a lot of area, too. She makes it easy for me and Norah. We didn’t have to pass a ton. We did a really good job moving our feet too, because they would either push us deep and short. Everyone was talking. We were on it and did a good job.”
Creighton will square off with conference rival Marquette in tomorrow night’s title match. The Golden Eagles grinded out a first set win and rolled the rest of the way to a 26-24, 25-14, 25-16 sweep of Villanova in the nightcap of the semifinal round on Friday. The Jays won both meetings in four sets during the regular season to clinch the conference title outright.
They are 5-1 against the Golden Eagles with the automatic bid on the line with the lone loss coming in the first meeting in 2014 in Omaha. First serve between the Bluejays (28-2, 19-0 Big East) and Golden Eagles (23-7, 17-2 Big East) is set for 5:00 p.m. CT on Fox Sports 2.