Three wins in three days moves the Golden Eagles to 15-6 on the year and riding a nine match winning streak
FRIDAY
Marquette volleyball and Seton Hall took turns stuffing each other in a trash can through the first three sets, leaving the Golden Eagles holding a 2-1 lead.
I’m only slightly joking about that. Marquette took the first set 25-16 while outhitting the Pirates .310 to .048. Set #2 went to Seton Hall while Marquette had 11 errors against nine kills for a negative hitting percentage and SHU ended up with a 25-17 win. Next up: .379 for the visitors, .000 for the home team, and Marquette wins, 25-13.
The “What even is this match” continued in the fourth frame, but in a completely different way. Extra chaos, so to speak. Seton Hall scored four straight early to go up 12-9, and thus Marquette was chasing the set the rest of the way. They closed to just one at 18-17, on a Carsen Murray kill, but the next five points went to the Pirates. That gave Seton Hall the edge they needed to hold off Marquette as the Golden Eagles closed to within four points and fended off set point once before Senna Roberts-Navarro scored to push things to a fifth set tiebreaker.
From a 5-5 tie, Marquette scored five of the next six points to take a 10-6 lead, and now it was MU’s turn to make that gap be enough to hold off a response. Roberts-Navarro scored, the last of her team high 13 kills, to make it 11-8, but the match ultimately turned on her own mistakes. MU got to match point as she missed on a kill, and then she missed on a serve after an Ella Foti attack error, and that was that.
It had no business going to five sets, much less four, as Marquette was entirely responsible for the “oops all errors” second set, but a win’s a win, they count the same as the rest of them.
Aubrey Hamilton (.119), Ella Foti (.042), and Natalie Ring (.188) all had subpar days, but not Hattie Bray. She put up a match high 15 kills while hitting .414. Shouts to Milwaukee’s area code.
How about some highlights, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and FloSports?
SATURDAY
Thankfully, it seems that Marquette did not experience a hangover after going five sets on Friday afternoon and then playing again 20 hours later an hour down the road. The Golden Eagles crushed Princeton 25-13 in the first and third sets and squeezed in a closer-than-it-looked 25-21 second set win over the Tigers for a quick 3-0 sweep.
After having a set on Friday where they finished with more errors than kills, Marquette didn’t miss on a swing until they had gotten their point total into the 20s in the first set against Princeton. That error let the Tigers pull within 12 at 21-9, so that final score wasn’t really indicative of what was going on.
MU had an early edge in the second set and could have been on the edge of tearing the thing open again, but Princeton rallied to get it within a point. That’s the best that they could do, though. The Tigers got it within one a few times, but eventually Ella Foti and Aubrey Hamilton both paired up a kill followed by an ace for the 4-1 stretch to close it out.
Princeton got a lead for the first time all day in the third set as Natalie Ring couldn’t get a kill to drop and that had the Tigers up 6-5 in the early going. Mariah Haislip pulled the home team even at eight….. and that’s when Marquette decided to stop goofing off, it seems. Six straight points for Marquette put them up 14-8 and it eventually turned into a 17-5 run for Marquette the rest of the way through. Logistically, sometimes it’s a very simple sport. If they never score more than one point in a row, you’re probably winning.
Three Golden Eagles hit double digits in kills here, led by 12 from Natalie Ring, who hit .407 in the match. Things that are fun: Princeton’s lead attacker, Kamryn Chaney, came in averaging more than 4.4 kills per set, and MU held her to just six on 25 swings.
Highlights, mostly from the endline viewpoint, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and ESPN+:
SUNDAY
I don’t have a single idea of how this match went other than the official recap and box score because Georgetown thinks they’re special and they didn’t put the match on FloSports. Instead, it went behind their super special HoyaVision paywall, and well, I’m not paying them for a month of access because that’s dumb.
Speaking of dumb: Marquette averaged four aces per set against Georgetown on Sunday, as they got 12 of their 75 points on unreturned serves.
A 9-1 run late tilted the first set towards Marquette from a 14-14 tie. Seems good. At the very least, it’s better than how the second set went, as the Golden Eagles fell behind 14-8 on an attack error by Natalie Ring. MU pulled even at 15 — think about what that means — and just kept on going to a 25-20 win. 17-6. Yep.
That 17-6 stretch kept right on going in the third. GU kept it close early, but then Marquette scored nine in a row to go up 19-7, and from there, it was just a matter of time. 25-9 in the third, so that’s a 42-15 run by Marquette to close out the match. That’s very much the behavior of a team that said “hey, we went 5 sets on Friday, let’s not do any more volleyball than we have to, okay? Cool.”
Ella Foti was your offensive leader in this one, getting to 11 kills while hitting .500.
One last highlight reel, and no, I don’t know how GUHoyas.com feels about GoMarquette.com putting this video up like this.
PHEW. Six matches in 10 days, all wins by the Golden Eagles. Busy busy busy. In the words of Jed Bartlet: What’s next?
Up Next: Marquette won’t have to leave town against until November 6th, so they’ve got that going for them, which is nice. Villanova comes to the McGuire Center for a match on Friday, November 1st, and then St. John’s comes in on November 3rd. As things stand right now, Villanova is holding a Big East tournament berth at 6-4 in league action, while St. John’s is one game back of them at 5-5 but currently on the outside looking in.