Creighton bagged a good result on Friday night with a 25-22, 25-17, 25-20 sweep at Butler to begin their pursuit of a 10th consecutive Big East regular season title. Sophomore outside hitter Ava Martin led the way with nine kills to go along with seven digs, junior setter Kendra Wait stuffed the stat sheet as usual with 21 assists, nine digs, four blocks, and four kills, and senior libero Ellie Bolton chipped in eight digs, five assists, and a team-best two aces to help the Bluejays win their fifth straight match and improve their overall record to 10-2 on the season as conference play gets underway.
Head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth enjoys getting the sweep over Butler (Juszyk / WBR)
“I’m always happy to get a road win and a sweep,” CU head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “I didn’t think we were as crisp as we needed to be, especially offensively. We struggled with their tempo in lining up our blocks … but we held them to a pretty low clip so that was good, and it was nice to get people some experience on the court too.”
Creighton finished the night with a .196 attack percentage, which was just the second time all season they’ve hit below .200. A lot of that had to do with Butler’s 5-foot-4 senior tone-setter Jaymeson Kinley. The reigning two-time Big East Libero of the Year had a match-high 22 digs — good for an All-American level 7.33 digs per set — and made it hard for the Jays to put the ball down all night. But Creighton didn’t let her presence affect their aggressiveness, a lesson they learned a four-set loss at Nebraska back on September 6.
“I thought she was really impressive,” Booth said of Butler’s defensive ace. “They set up their block to funnel balls to her as often as possible, and she did a great job covering — she had what, 22 digs? So she got way too many touches on the ball, but I felt like in the Nebraska match we were so locked in to not letting [Lexi] Rodriguez touch the ball that it changed what we were doing so much. Tonight, we wanted our hitters to know that if they see something, hit it hard and put it down.”
While Creighton has had cleaner overall performances offensively, some of their hitters did manage to execute their head coach’s hopes of being aggressive and terminal regardless of the quality of defender they are hitting at. Martin hit .259 on 27 attempts, sophomore middle blocker Ann Marie Remmes had five kills and hit a team-best .333, and graduate transfer Ellie Bichelmeyer ended up with six kills from the right side for the second match in a row, hitting .267 on 15 swings with just two attack errors. Bichelmeyer’s first two kills early in the match were right down the line where Kinley was camped out behind the Butler block.
“Ellie does a good job seeing the block and she likes that shot a lot,” Booth said. “I don’t think it was intentional to go after Kinley, I think it was more of she wanted to hit the ball hard and take what Butler was giving to her.”
Creighton was aggressive from the service line (Juszyk / WBR)
One carryover from last weekend’s big win at Minnesota was the performance from the service line. Creighton had seven aces and eight errors in the five-set win over the Golden Gophers. On Friday night, they wound up with six aces against seven errors, and when they weren’t scoring themselves, they were often keeping Butler setter Cora Taylor off the net which led to 14 unforced errors by her group of hitters. Only one Bulldog finished the match with an attack percentage above .150. The Bluejays held Butler to .035 hitting on their final 85 attempts.
“This is a team that we felt like we needed to serve aggressively against,” Booth said. “Statistically, their passing was just ok, but in the first game they were in system way too much. A team that runs a high-risk offense is pretty salty, so getting them out of system was pretty critical to us being able to limit them. If they had a single block they terminated at a really high rate, but when we got a double block in front of them, we controlled that scenario most of the time.”
Creighton will conclude their seven-match stretch away from D.J. Sokol Arena on Saturday at 4:00 p.m. (CT) against Xavier. The Musketeers went 7-4 in the non-conference before earning a narrow sweep at Butler on Wednesday night to open Big East play. XU was picked third in the Big East preseason poll behind Marquette and Creighton, and they return 11 players from last season including All-Big East honorees Brooklyn Cink, Carrigan O’Reilly, and Delaney Hogan along with sophomore outside hitter Emma Grace, who is leading Xavier this season in kills per set (2.79) and aces per set (0.38).
Needless to say, they certainly have the attention of Booth and the Bluejays.
“Xavier’s a dang good team. They’ll be coming off [three] days’ rest. They were picked third in the league, and they return almost everyone, so we’re going to have our hands full. They have good pieces all over the place and they run a super-fast tempo. We struggled some with that tonight, so we will have to be better. The good thing is we got some experience with it, so hopefully we can take that into tomorrow night.”