The Bluejays are getting their groove with their 2nd consecutive sweep of the weekend (Spomer / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
The Creighton volleyball team wrapped up a second-place finish at the 2016 Bluejay Invitational with a quick and easy 25-14, 25-19, 25-12 sweep of the Chattanooga Mocs on Saturday night at D.J. Sokol Arena.
The Bluejays improved to 4-4 on the season with the win, which came one night after they swept the TCU Horned Frogs. After coming up short in a high intensity five-setter against fourth-ranked Kansas on Thursday night, head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth was proud of the way her team turned the corner so quickly.
“I told them in the locker room I can’t be more proud of a team,” she said. “As a coach you feel out each team, you get a taste of their heart and how they handle things, and I’m pumped after this weekend. I think they showed what they’re made of and their mettle.”
“We talked in the preseason that it’s easy to be a great teammate when things are going your way, but it’s hard to be a great teammate and a great team when adversity hits. And that can be losing, that can be someone not getting playing time, all those different things. How we respond to those situations is going to determine how we move forward as a team, and they showed me a lot this weekend.”
As a team, Creighton hit a season-high .385 for the entire match and committed a season-low 10 attack errors in 91 swings against Chattanooga. They combined for a .474 attack percentage on 57 swings in the final two games, led by sophomore outside hitter Taryn Kloth and her match-high 17 kills.
Kloth set the tone for the Bluejays from the opening serve. She recorded the team’s first two kills of the match, then served up a 7-0 run — during which she added a couple more kills and an ace — to move her team out to a commanding 12-4 advantage. That lead eventually reached double digits and stayed there from the midway point on until a service error by Chattanooga closed it out at 25-14.
The second set was more competitive by comparison, but Creighton turned up the heat offensively to win it 25-19 and take a 2-0 lead at intermission. Junior setter Lydia Dimke had 14 assists in the second game, and six different Bluejays had at least two kills. They successfully terminated 16 of their 30 swings for a highly efficient .433 attack percentage.
Set three was a complete wipe out as Coach Booth’s club finished off the Mocs with 16 kills on 27 attacks, good for a .519 attack percentage and a 25-12 win. They led from the very first point and just added to the lead until Creighton sophomore Brittany Lawrence finished off the match with a kill on her first swing of the night.
Although Kloth was the only player for either team to reach double figures in kills, five other Bluejays had at least four kills. That includes Dimke herself, who had five kills with no errors on seven swings to go along with her match-high 39 assists. Overall, Creighton middles combined for 38 attacks, while the pin hitters totaled 46 throughout the three sets.
Lydia Dimke is seeing the court is so many different ways for the Bluejays (Streur / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
“We have so many great hitters on this team in the middle and on the pins,” Dimke said. “Any time I have an opportunity to give any of them the set that they want, and give them one blocker, I’m going to feed them and watch them go.”
While a balanced set distribution looks nice on the stat sheet, it’s not as important to Creighton’s 14-year head coach as how her setter is creating high percentage situations for the heavy hitters on the court.
“It’s about creating a hole,” Booth explained. “If a team is doing the same thing over and over, and clamping two on one hitter then go to the other hitter. I think the luxury that [Lydia] has is she trusts all of her hitters. If four hands are in front of Taryn, someone else should be getting the ball and Taryn needs to be okay with that. That’s a discussion we’ve had with Lydia — you don’t need to give everyone the ball every night. You find the person that has the single block and they will put the ball down for you. I think she’s been really working on seeing the block so that she can create that scenario for her hitters, and I think you saw that tonight.”
With three weekends now in the books, the team will turn the page to a busy week ahead beginning with a road trip to Manhattan, Kansas to take on Kansas State before heading down to Lincoln on Friday for the Ameritas Players Challenge where they will face Gonzaga, Montana State, and the reigning national champion Nebraska Cornhuskers over the weekend to wrap up the non-conference portion of their schedule.
Of course, if you know anything at all about how Creighton’s coaching staff prepares their players all they have in front of them is a one-game season beginning with the Wildcats on Tuesday night.
“From our standpoint it’s one match at a time,” Booth said. “That’s our philosophy every match of the season. Someone was asking me about Nebraska, and I haven’t even thought about them. Everything, even from a coaching standpoint right now, is locked into K-State, and then it will be locked in to Gonzaga.”
“It’s like a syllabus in college, if you look at it holistically it becomes overwhelming, but if you take it one assignment at a time it becomes very doable. So right now they are focused on Kansas State, and that’s all we want them focused on. Then win, lose, or draw we’ll move forward for the next match after that.”
Creighton is just 1-6 all-time in their meetings with the Wildcats, including an 0-5 mark away from Omaha. Their one and only win, however, came last season when the Bluejays erased an 0-2 deficit on September 20th at D.J. Sokol Arena to win in five sets. That began a run that saw them go 22-1 over a 23-match stretch that culminated in the first Sweet 16 appearance in program history.
First serve between the Bluejays and Kansas State is scheduled for 6:00 p.m. at the Ahearn Field House in Manhattan.
2016 Bluejay Invitational Results
- Kansas (2-0)
- Creighton (2-1)
- TCU (1-1)
- Chattanooga (0-3)
All-Tournament Team
- Cassie Wait (Kansas)
- Ainise Havili (Kansas)
- Madison Rigdon (Kansas)
- Regan McGuire (TCU)
- Kristy Wieser (Chattanooga)
- Lydia Dimke (Creighton)
- Taryn Kloth (Creighton)
- Most Valuable Player: Madison Rigdon