With six of their eight matches in the month of October coming away from Omaha, the Creighton volleyball team took full advantage of the D.J. Sokol Arena environment to kick off conference play. After dispatching Georgetown and Villanova last weekend, the Bluejays turned right around and wiped-out Xavier on Wednesday night and Butler on Friday night, both in drama-free fashion, to improve to 12-3 on the season and start 4-0 in the Big East for the sixth time in the last eight years.
Creighton 3, Xavier 0 (25-9, 25-17, 25-16)
Ava Martin continued her tear after freshman of the week honors (Spomer/WBR)
The Jays didn’t mess around for a minute in this one. Xavier came into this one sporting a 4-match winning streak and a 9-3 overall record, and they had Creighton’s full attention from the first serve. CU sided-out on each of their first five opportunities as they opened up a 19-5 lead in set one before cruising to a 25-9 win and a 1-0 match lead. The Musketeers got off to a better start in game two, using a 6-1 run to build a 13-10 lead midway through the set. At that point, Kirsten Bernthal Booth called the only timeout she would need to burn all night and her team responded with a 15-4 run to close out the set and take a 2-0 match lead into intermission. Creighton never trailed in game three and finished off the sweep with a 25-16 win.
“We knew from film that Xavier was a really good team,” Bernthal Booth said. “We knew that if they were in system that they had a lot of good parity, a lot of good hitters, and a ton of different patterns for our blockers to have to track. The first game was probably the cleanest set we’ve played all year … we were serving great, our defense was on, our offense was clicking — I just thought we were really potent.
“Overall, it was a really good night. Anytime you can sweep a good conference team it’s a good thing.”
Xavier finished the match with an .059 attack percentage, the lowest by a Creighton opponent since St. John’s hit .029 in Omaha on November 21st of last year. No one on the Musketeers had more than seven kills on the night. Creighton, meanwhile, hit a season-high .381 as a team. They were led offensively by sophomore six-rotation stud Norah Sis and freshman outside hitter Ava Martin, who was coming off of being named Big East Freshman of the Week. Sis ended the night her eighth double-double of the season, hitting. 344 and finishing with 13 kills and 10 digs. Martin tallied a career-high 14 kills and nearly cracked the program’s single-match top 10 with a .684 attack percentage by committing only one attack error on 19 swings.
Creighton 3, Butler 0 (25-15, 25-16, 25-17)
Head coach Kirsten Bernthal-Booth had a surprise for Butler on Friday night (Spomer / WBR)
In a matchup that is normally a tightly contested, back-and-forth affair, the Bluejays looked dominant in sweeping a Butler team that took a set from them in both meetings last season. The only time Creighton trailed all night was when it was 2-1 very early in set three. They closed game one with a 16-6 run, opened up a 15-6 lead in game two, and used a 6-1 spurt midway through game three to blow open all three sets and win each one comfortably.
“If you look at the statistics, it looks like a great match,” Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “We hit at a high clip, we dug at a high clip, we blocked well, our side-out percentage was really high, so those things are great. With that said, I thought we won points that we could have won earlier in the rally, so I think we’ll have to look at film and talk about did we put up a good second ball? Did we take a good swing? The whole idea of bettering the ball. But overall, I thought we were good and as I told [the players], we started [conference play] with two weekends at home and to come out 4-0 is really important to the long term of the season and in the Big East race. Four sweeps is pretty good.”
Ava Martin was the star offensively once again in this one. Two nights after setting her career-high with 14 kills against Xavier she matched that effort against the Bulldogs on .500 hitting. She also finished with a career-high six digs and recorded her first career ace with a serve that she dropped right in front of Butler’s Jaymeson Kinley, the Big East Libero of the Year last season. The Bluejays also got a lift when Jaela Zimmerman returned from her torn ACL in the NCAA Tournament to serve the final point in the first set.
Creighton held Butler to .108 hitting and sided-out at a season-high 80% clip for the match. The Bulldogs scored back-to-back points to tie the first set at 6-6, then didn’t score consecutive points again over the next 50 rallies. The Jays can attribute some credit to their back row defense once again as they out-dug a scrappy Butler team 58-41, but their blocking deserves some praise as well. Their touches at the net were more forceful and consistent, which can be a sign of quicker reads and better setups. The eight ace blocks as a team were the most they’ve had in a 3-set match this season.
“[Blocking] is something that we’ve been touching a lot on, especially throughout the preseason and beginning of conference,” sophomore middle blocker Kiara Reinhardt said. “We’ve gotten a lot of good block touches, but not necessarily block aces. That’s something we’ve been focusing a lot on in the last week of practice. Just how can we make small changes that can better set us up for success, and I feel like we are starting to do some of those things and some of those [changes] were clicking. It was a lot of fun — I love blocking.”
The Bluejays return to action, beginning their first conference road trip on October 7th at UConn and the following afternoon at Providence.