Kirsten Bernthal Booth’s volleyball team is turning into a powerhouse without a peer, and Friday night at D.J. Sokol Arena was no exception. The ninth-ranked Bluejays stayed balanced on offense and battled on defense to remain unbeaten in Big East play with a 25-19, 25-20, 25-15 sweep of the Georgetown Hoyas in their first home match in nearly three weeks.
Creighton hit .350 for the match and held the Hoyas to sub-.200 attack percentages in each of the three sets. They dug or blocked 57 of the 104 attacks they faced and held the Hoyas to a .144 hitting clip for the match.
“I thought our dig transition-to-attack was pretty good tonight … and then I thought we played ugly decently,” Bernthal Booth said. “What I mean by that is on that ball that’s really low, the next person barely gets it, and then we free ball it over. That tenacity was good to see, and it gave us an opportunity to defend even if we sent a free ball over.”
Jaali Winters and Taryn Kloth set the tone offensively for the Jays in set one. The senior pin hitters combined for 10 kills with only one attack error between them on 17 swings. Serve receive wasn’t very sharp early for the Bluejays, but their attack made up for it by out-hitting the Hoyas .394 to .057 to win game one 25-19. Junior setter Madelyn Cole had 11 assists in the set. She got five different hitters involved with at least 5 swings for each of them. Four of Creighton’s hitters finished the opening set with an attack percentage of at least .400.
Georgetown came out with some counter punches in game two. The Hoyas opened the set with a 5-1 run that forced an early timeout by Kirsten Bernthal Booth. After the break, Kloth found openings to put the ball down four times during a big run that moved the Bluejays in front 12-8. Junior outside hitter Iva Vujosevic answered with a 5-point serving run midway through the set to put the visitors back in the lead. The offense was humming along as the Hoyas led 19-16, but Creighton mounted a nearly flawless comeback and stole the game with a 9-1 run to head to the locker room up two games to none. Kloth tallied two more kills late and Cole nailed an ace off of a back row defender to clinch the 25-20 win.
The message late in game two was simple: lock it in and keep it clean.
“That’s kind of our mentality when we’re down,” Kloth said. “We know that we can come back, we just have to make sure that we are playing clean volleyball.”
Set three was all Creighton from the jump. It started with a kill by junior middle blocker Megan Ballenger and ended with Taryn Kloth’s 15th termination of the night. They sided-out at 93 percent in game three and never trailed en route to a 25-15 clincher that improved the Bluejays to 23-4 overall and 15-0 in Big East play with three regular season matches left on the schedule.
Eleven of Kloth’s match-high 15 kills came in sets two and three, and the senior All-American from Sioux Falls, South Dakota only needed 16 swings to get number over the final two games. She finished the match with a .609 attack percentage — the second-highest single-match hitting clip of her decorated career.
“I just tried to move the ball around and find the open areas,” Kloth said of her ultra-efficient performance. “I have [junior libero Brittany Witt] right behind me telling me where they are, so that’s always nice, and Madelyn distributed a good ball and [sophomore middle blocker Naomi Hickman] pulled blockers, so it worked out well.”
Kloth also finished tied for second on the team with eight digs on the night, but all of her defensive praise went to her 6-foot-4, soft-spoken sophomore teammate.
“Naomi did a fantastic job of blocking tonight,” she said, unprovoked.
Hickman was instrumental in holding Georgetown outside hitters Iva Vujosevic and Alyssa Sinnette to a collective attack percentage of .093 on 54 swings.
“I think we did a decent job of containing them and fronting them,” Hickman said. “We worked on that a lot in practice this week.”
Her match-high six blocks were the most she’s had since an October 5th home match against Seton Hall, and were just one shy of tying her career-high.
Creighton will return to action on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. when they host the Villanova Wildcats at D.J. Sokol Arena. With a win the Bluejays will secure at least a share of their fifth consecutive Big East regular season title.
