Volleyball: Flawed Marquette drops opener to Lexington

OTTAWA – It’s not all that unusual for a volleyball team to discover in its first match of the season that it needs a little fine tuning in one or more areas of its game.

Just ask Marquette, because that was the somewhat painful lesson it took away from Tuesday night’s season opener against Lexington at its home Bader Gym.

The Crusaders started out like a house afire, riding the crowd-driven electric atmosphere out to a 6-1 lead in the first set. It didn’t take long, however, for the Minutemen to regroup, take advantage of some little Marquette flaws to seize the momentum and then hold on to it for the rest of their 25-19, 25-12 victory.

Lexington tied the opener at 6-6, then left the Cru chasing them the rest of the night until a 13-1 burst finished off the second set and the match.

Eva McCallum and Avery Durdan each collected five kills, Lindsey Kaufmann had six digs, Nora Rinearson had four digs and Maera Jimenez totaled seven assists in the loss.

“Lexington’s a good team, so hats off to them. They absolutely won this match tonight,” Marquette coach Mindy McConnaughhay said. “Unfortunately we did get ourselves out of system a lot, at times our serve receive wasn’t as strong as it should have been, and we also had a lot of hitting errors. We had uncharacteristic errors, like we’d make a huge play on defense, but a blocker would be in the net. It was a lot of ticky-tack sloppy things, a lot I’d chalk up to a first game, and I’m disappointed it stayed that sloppy in the second set.

“But the good news is it’s all stuff you can correct and learn from. I was glad to see the girls stayed aggressive the whole time, but we have to do a better job of controlling the momentum, to hanging on to it once you get it. No more roller coasters.”

A kill by McCallum, an ace by Kaylee Killelea and a block by Mary Lechtenberg and McCallum on Lexington’s Avery Poppe made it 3-0 Cru, then McCallum added a sideout kill and two service points to run the early lead to 6-1.

But that’s where the momentum stopped. The Minutemen adjusted to the noise level and soon a sideout kill by Makayla Ziegler and five points from Poppe knotted the score.

A Killelea tip of an overpass gave Marquette back the lead, but a service error and four points by Ziegler – two coming on Cru alignment errors – opened up an 11-7 Minutemen lead. Marquette climbed to within 18-16 on a Killelea kill, but the teams traded points until Issy Bennett closed it out with points on back-to-back Marquette hitting errors.

The second set see-sawed until a net violation and two points by Bennett made it 10-8 Lexington. Eventually, a Maisie Lyons point narrowed the gap to 12-11 before Lexington’s Claire Peacock stepped to the line and served seven straight points, the last four coming on Marquette miscues.

A Lechtenberg kill ended that run, but a Poppe kill and four points by Reagan Haase – an ace and three Cru errors – ended the match in frustrating manner for the hosts.

“The atmosphere here is great. The student section is loud, the gym is small and very loud and I think that caught us off guard at the start,” Lexington coach Kelli Aho said. “We weren’t able to hear each other talk, so at my first timeout I emphasized that we had to talk early, talk loud and because we had difficulty hearing, if you started after a ball, keep going for it. Don’t hesitate. Be aggressive and be responsible for going after it because we couldn’t talk it out, and the girls did a great job adapting and settling down.

“We have a good mix of experience and young players and I’m very proud of them for, for the first time in a match situation, figuring things out and looking like they’ve been playing together for years.”