Creighton’s serving was key in Friday night’s victory (Juszyk / WBR)
Creighton outscored Xavier in five of their six rotations in a 25-18, 25-22, 25-22 sweep at D.J. Sokol Arena on Friday night to improve their overall record to 23-3 and their conference record to 11-2 as they continue the pursuit their eighth consecutive Big East regular season title.
The 24th-ranked Bluejays, who entered the night with an official RPI of 11, jumped out to a 14-5 lead against a team that had dropped five straight matches and seven of their last eight coming in. However, the Musketeers didn’t roll over as they rallied to within three points late in set one and pushed CU the whole night despite falling short in all three sets to fall to 10-14 on the season and 5-8 in Big East play.
“I’m always impressed with Xavier, especially when they are in system,” Creighton head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “I think their setter is just so good. They run such a difficult offense. I thought as the match went on we did a better job adjusting to it.
“I thought our offense at points was really good, but I thought sometimes we made back-to-back errors more often than we needed to — both offensively and in serve receive, and even defensively. As [assistant coach Craig Dyer] said, ‘we’re being greedy,’ but I think we still need to play cleaner than we played tonight. At points I thought we looked really good. We just need to do it consistently.”
One area that was fairly consistent, at least in its production was Creighton’s ability to score out of every rotation regardless of who was behind the line.
Junior Keeley Davis and seniors Abby Bottomley and Jaela Zimmerman are considered to be the best servers on the team, combining for 85 of the team’s 125 aces on the season entering the weekend. But on Friday night against the Musketeers, it was junior Ally Van Eekeren along freshmen Kendra Wait and Norah Sis who produced four of Creighton’s five aces over the course of the three sets.
The Jays scored 41 of their 75 points out of those three rotations.
“We stat which rotations we side out the best in, which rotations we serve the best in, and what we’ve learned is it varies week to week,” Booth said. “I don’t know which rotation won tonight from a serving standpoint, but we’ve worked really hard to make sure we have six good servers serving all the time. We think we have the potential to score in each rotation. It’s definitely a priority and I think all of our servers have the potential to allow us to go on runs.”
Junior Ally Van Eekeren was a serving ace on Friday night (Juszyk / WBR)
Xavier’s serving was disruptive at several points throughout the match, which made it tough for Creighton to sustain scoring runs and getting into a rhythm on offense, which in turn kept each set relatively competitive at end game. The Jays scored three of the final four points to win set two and four of the final six to win set three to seal the match, but they weren’t able to find the gear that allowed them to put each set away earlier than that.
“I thought they disrupted our passing more than our passing has been disrupted in a while,” Booth said. “They served us short and I thought we handled that well, but then they got us in the seams a couple times and Moriah Hopkins slowed us down some on the right side from a blocking standpoint.
“But I think a lot of it was on us. I thought maybe we were a bit predictable at different times. Those are things that we’ll look at on film and I think we can get better at immediately.”
Baked into that analysis Kirsten Bernthal Booth the fact that Creighton’s performances as a program at this point can’t simply be measured in the wins and losses. The six banners hanging at D.J. Sokol Arena are a constant reminder of that.
It was a team effort on this night for the Bluejays (Juszyk / WBR)
As her fourth-year assistant coach, Craig Dyer, pointed out after the match, the Bluejays are “greedy.” That’s how they call for improvement with a straight face in a match where they outhit their opponent by 110 percentage points.
In fact, Creighton’s .286 attack percentage is their third-highest in Big East play so far this fall. Despite Xavier’s serving, the Bluejays still hit .360 with only two unforced errors on 50 first-ball attacks all night. Norah Sis led all players with 14 kills and hit .423.
Between her, Zimmerman, Davis, and senior middle blocker/right side hitter Annika Welty, Creighton’s top four hitters this season produced 39 kills and a .326 attack percentage against the Musketeers on Friday night.
That’s part of the reason they are tied with the 2012 Creighton team for the best start to a season through 26 matches.
They’ll look to keep pace with that group, as well as this year’s Marquette squad — as far as the Big East standings go — when they return to their home court on Sunday afternoon for a 1:00 p.m. match against Butler.