The Women’s Volleyball team fought hard against University of Massachusetts-Boston last Saturday but eventually came up short in a 3-2 loss on Oct. 19.
In the match against UMass Boston, the Beacons pulled ahead of KSC in the fourth set of the game where they finished off the Owls in the fifth set with a win of 3-2 (25-23, 23-25, 22-25, 25-11,15-9). First-year Marina Miller finished the match with 16 kills and helped push the Owls points ahead. In the second and third sets of the game, Keene State was able to pull ahead and had a total of three kills. In the other three sets though, they were only able to total for 19 kills and were outhit .157 to .096.
Miller commented, “Overall, I thought we played really well as a team and put up a good fight. We definitely need to work on finishing games strong, but with that said I am really proud of how we worked together and had fun.”
During the final fifth set the stakes were high, but KSC could not pull ahead of UMB and were only able to get three kills and five errors. Lauren Westlund of UMass Boston was able to get three straight kills in a 5-0 run when KSC called a timeout. In the end though, UMass Boston took the win leaving KSC with another loss.
Throughout the match, there were a total of 44 ties and 17 lead changes but things quickly changed when UMass gained a consecutive eight points that put them in a seven-point lead that KSC was never able to threaten. The Owls made it 12-7 after a block by Keene’s Molly Wetherbee but UMD came back hard and made six out of the next eight points theirs, doubling the score 18-9.
After the fight the Owls put in, they were able to come back from 19-19 and 22-22 followed up by a rally of 11-6 and 16-12, closing on a 13-6 surge which featured four kills by Stephanie Olah. Another player on KSC that made a big impact was Annaliese Rudberg who had a kill that changed the third set where she had three spikes and a block while overall she had nine kills, three blocks and two block assists.
Junior Gigi Stake finished with eight kills for KSC while seniors Olah and Wetherbee finished with seven each. Senior Theresa Norris added 15 digs, Stake with 18 and sophomore Alexis Small had 40 assists. In the fight for the win, KSC wasn’t able to come out on top despite their fight for five sets straight.
The Keene State Volleyball team will go on the road to take on LEC opponent University of Southern Maine on Saturday, Oct 26.
Olivia Casale can be contacted at
ocasale@kscequinox.com
