The University of Denver volleyball team capped off its sweep of the weekend’s three matches with a victory Sunday night against the University of Louisiana at Lafayette 3-0 (25-11, 25-20, 25-13) at the Hamilton gymnasium.
Last night’s victory stretched the Pioneer’s winning streak to nine and moved the team record to 15-2 overall and 4-0 in the Sun Belt Conference, while remaining undefeated at home (10-0).
In game one, the Pioneers capitalized on early ULL mistakes and took a lead from which the Ragin’ Cajuns could not recover.
The second game started off even when they went up 8-0 on serves by freshman Jordan Raines. However, the Pioneers lost focus and allowed ULL to catch up. DU head coach Beth Kuwata called a timeout to refocus the team before ULL could ultimately catch up.
“We let a couple errors and their more aggressive style of play affect us a little bit and it took us a few points in order for us to bounce back from that,” said Kuwata. “We continue to talk about doing what we do and playing to our strengths.”
“Yes, we want to speed up the play, but all within how we normally do it,” Kuwata said. “Not speeding it up so that I am passing a BB right at your forehead. Yeah, we want to speed up the game, but not to failure.”
In the third game, DU went back to its more familiar and confident style of team play and wow to their third set in a row.
“Yes, we played well,” said Kuwata. “I think there are some things that we can obviously clean up that will make us feel a lot better about how we’re playing, mostly in the area of taking care of the ball and ball handling a little bit. Not that we’re looking for perfect, but there are things that are within our control that we can technically do a little with.”
Among the key players was junior setter Clare Maxwell who supplied 38 assists in the match, her 14th with more than 30 assists this season.
“I think we did pretty well,” said Maxwell. “We stuck to the game plan and we had our moments of greatness. You could see the potential in our team in some of the plays.”
“Some teams have one stellar hitter, or one really good middle or libero, but our style of play is really team oriented,” Maxwell said. “Its not really just one person dominating the entire game.
It’s like everyone steps up at different points in time, which makes us hard to stop and then it make it hard to bring us down as well. I have options in every single rotation to set and it makes my job really easy.”
Sophomore libero Kacie Wikierak was honored Monday as Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Week with 37 digs in three matches. This is the second Defensive Player of the Week honor for Wikierak and the third defensive honor for the Pioneers this season.
The Pioneers head to Florida this weekend to take on Florida International and Florida Atlantic.
DU returns home next week to host Western Kentucky on Friday, Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. and Middle Tennessee on Saturday, Oct. 18 at 6 p.m. in Hamilton gymnasium.
“We have a really tough next two weeks coming up,” Kuwata said.
“We’re going to be playing four teams from the east, three of the potential best teams with FIU and then Middle Tennessee and Western Kentucky here, so, we need to continue to raise our level throughout the season and cleaning up the little small things is obviously a big part of us continuing to improve.”
