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Arizona State Sweeps No. 8 Stanford
No. 12 Arizona State took it in three, the last of them 26-24, and it is the fourth ranked team the Sun Devils have beaten in ten matches. The program record for a whole season is eight.
Arizona State swept Stanford 3-0 (25-19, 25-21, 26-24) on Thursday night at Mott Athletics Center in San Luis Obispo, in the SLO Classic. The Sun Devils are 8-2 and Stanford is 5-3.
Stanford went into it ranked eighth and Arizona State twelfth. Sixty-three coaches filled that ballot in on Monday and put 121 points between the two of them, out of more than a thousand each.
It is the fourth ranked team Arizona State has beaten in ten matches. The four are No. 2 Texas, No. 14 Minnesota, No. 24 Oregon and No. 8 Stanford, per Dan Allison of Sports Illustrated.
Jordyn Harvey Hit .455 and Lost
Stanford's opposite had 18 kills on a .455 clip and four digs. Outside hitter Julia Blyashov had 10 more kills at .391, setter Logan Parks had 33 assists and eight digs, and the Cardinal finished the night hitting .255 with five blocks and two aces.
Arizona State answered with three hitters in double figures. Aniya Clinton and Una Vajagic had 15 kills each, Clinton at .522, Vajagic with 14 digs and two blocks beside hers, and Noemie Glover had 14 more.
Elle Mottola, a freshman, set 45 assists. It is the most she has had in a match.
Two Stanford hitters were as good as anybody on the floor and it made no difference, because Arizona State had three.
A Week Earlier They Lost to UC Davis
On Thursday 10 September, ranked seventh, Arizona State lost at Desert Financial Arena to an unranked UC Davis side that won it 25-19, 25-20, 21-25, 25-22, the highest-ranked win in UC Davis history.
JJ Van Niel had coached Arizona State to a 36-2 record in that building before that night, per Annika Hietanen of Cronkite Sports.
What Arizona State talked about between sets that night, by its setter's account, was whether the group still trusted itself.
Arizona State senior setter Isabella Costantini, to the university's own site on the night of the UC Davis match.
Just understanding that games like this are going to happen, we're not going to be perfect the entire time, and just being able to be confident in one another is something that we talked about in between sets. Trusting that we know how to do it. I think that our conversation is mainly about saying, 'OK, how can we learn from this and grow out of this and still be able to trust each other and come back tomorrow even stronger?' I just think it's resetting pretty quick and keeping the trust that we individually know how to do it and we can trust each other to get back tomorrow.
They won twice more at the Snyder-Park Classic to finish it 2-1, No. 24 Oregon among them on 11 September, and dropped five places in Monday's ballot anyway.
Arizona State was ranked seventh when UC Davis beat it. On Thursday it swept the team that is ranked eighth now. This is less a leap than a side climbing back to the altitude it fell from.
The Record Is Eight and It Is September
The program record for ranked wins in a season is eight, and it took the whole of last year. Ten matches into this one, Arizona State has four.
Van Niel is in his fourth season in Tempe and has 20 wins over ranked teams in it, six of them against the top ten. Two of the six have come in the past three weeks.
