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Friday Takeaways: Louisville's Third Ranked Win
Nebraska swept DePaul in front of a record 8,786 in Chicago. No. 10 Creighton needed five sets to get past an unranked Arizona team in its home opener.
It took Louisville 27 points to close the third set on Friday night and the match still finished as a sweep.
No. 6 Louisville beat No. 18 TCU 3-0 (25-23, 25-14, 27-25) at the L&N Federal Credit Union Arena, hit .412 as a team and served five aces to one. It is Louisville's third win over a ranked opponent this season and its third straight at home.
TCU hit .299 and had 42 kills to Louisville's 51. Two days earlier TCU had beaten No. 8 SMU in five.
Three ranked teams played on Friday and this is the one that looked like its ranking.
Nebraska hit .434 against a team that had won four in a row, and No. 10 Creighton went the full five sets with an unranked Arizona side in its own gym.
Seventeen Kills Each and One at .615
Kalyssa Blackshear finished with 17 kills on 26 attempts with a single error, which is .615 from the opposite position against a ranked block. She was the most efficient hitter on the floor by a distance.
Chloe Chicoine finished with the same 17 kills from the outside at .433, with an ace. Nayelis Cabello had 36 assists and dug 18 balls, a career high.
Both of them got there in bursts. Louisville trailed 8-4 in the first set and answered with nine points to one, went on a six-point service run in the second to lead 15-5, and needed extra points in the third before a TCU attack error ended it.
Nebraska Drew 8,786 to a Non-Conference Sweep
Nebraska swept DePaul 3-0 (25-19, 25-13, 25-15) at Wintrust Arena in Chicago and hit .434 to DePaul's .060.
The crowd was 8,786, which Nebraska's own report calls a DePaul volleyball attendance record for the programme.
DePaul had won its first four matches of the season and was held to 13 points in the second set of this one. The record crowd watched the home team hit .060.
Creighton Went Five With an Unranked Team
No. 10 Creighton beat Arizona 3-2 in its home opener at the D.J. Sokol Arena, and it is a thirteenth straight home win rather than a comfortable one.
We are not printing the individual set scores, because the only published string of them contradicts Creighton's own account of the match. Creighton's account is the one everything else here comes from.
Trinity Shadd-Ceres finished with a career-high 29 kills, eleven of them in a fourth set Creighton hit .739 in, which Creighton says is the third-best single set in its history. Katie Dalton passed 1,000 career assists in the same match.
Arizona's Destiny Ndam-Simpson set career highs of her own in the loss, and Arizona served twelve aces to Creighton's seven and led the match after two sets.
Arizona head coach Rita Stubbs, speaking to Kim Doss of SB Nation.
“I thought we got a little hesitant in the fifth set versus being the aggressor. We were doing a phenomenal job blocking in sets one through three, and then all of a sudden that died off, and zero had her way with us.”
Stubbs is describing the end of a match her team led for two sets, and the player she names by number is one of Creighton's. Arizona is not ranked and Creighton has not lost at home since last season.
Stubbs, a few answers later in the same interview.
“It’s not hard getting the team motivated for a top 10 opponent. There’s no work for that. The key is how do you respond when a team that’s equal to you or even better than you, just not in the top 10.”
That is the right question and Arizona answered the first half of it on Friday. They led a top-ten team by two sets on the road and then stopped blocking, which is a different problem from not being good enough.
Arizona plays Tulsa in the same building this afternoon. Serve at anything like Friday night's rate and the block is the only item left on the list.
