Men's Volleyball: Tigers top Highlanders 3-0 for Senior Night win

Beat down.

In one of its most dominant performances this season, Princeton (9-9 overall, 3-6 Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association Tait Division) scored a crushing 30-20, 30-12, 30-17 victory over the New Jersey Institute of Technology (3-21, 0-11) at Dillon Gymnasium. The undersized Highlanders had neither the height nor skill to compete with Princeton’s big hitters.

“If we made sure to keep our serves in, we were going to win,” junior rightside hitter Carl Hamming said. “No doubt.”

The Tigers hit .493 for the match — with only nine errors — and hit .654 in the second game. NJIT, by comparison, hit .000 for the match — 20 kills and 20 errors on 43 attempts — and finished with negative attack percentages in the first and second games.

The disparity in the two teams was palpable from the beginning. Early in the first game, the two teams were knotted at eight, but Princeton’s points seemed to come from effortless kills while NJIT’s came from Tiger errors or lapses in concentration. Princeton eventually came alive, however, scoring five straight points on Hamming’s serve before finishing the first game and winning the next two in emphatic fashion.

“You have to remember to keep your energy level high,” Hamming said. “Sometimes you have a tendency to play down to your opponent, and you kind of saw that at the beginning of the first game, but then we got it together and ran away with it.”

“It’s hard to stay up sometimes,” senior setter and captain Brandon Denham said. “But we did that, and the scoreline reflects it.”

Princeton was superior in every facet of the game — passing, setting, hitting and serving — and especially on defense, where any time the Highlanders tried to play through the middle, their attempts were met by some combination of Hamming, Denham, senior middle blocker Mike Vincent and junior middle blocker Jeff McCown. NJIT attempts frequently came off bad sets, and any two of the four would barely have to jump to extinguish the try. The Highlanders simply had no size in the middle to pressure the Tigers.

On the other side of the net, Princeton’s outside hitters, senior Phil Rosenberg and sophomore Vincent Tuminelli, were afforded uncontested swings by the NJIT defense. Tuminelli employed a mix of deep spikes and deft touches, and even on one play during the second game, Tuminelli’s mishit was bungled by the Highlander libero. The duo had the best stats on the day: Rosenberg collected 11 kills on .643 hitting while Tuminelli picked up 10 kills on .562 hitting.

The Tigers’ performance, though complete, was far from perfect. In addition to the beginning of the first game, Princeton also endured sloppy stretches at the end of the first and second games. But in each case, someone was on hand to emphatically punctuate the game.

Princeton was in part buoyed by the home crowd, which had come out to support the team’s seniors in one of the final home games of their careers.

“It was nice to get the bench in,” Denham said. “Our fans came out, and we wanted to give them something good to watch.”

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Things are about to get significantly harder for Princeton, however. Though the win last night clinched it a spot in the EIVA playoffs, the Tigers face three tough matches between now and the end of the regular season. St. Francis, which Princeton defeated in a five-set thriller earlier this season, visits Dillon on Thursday. Perennial power Penn State, which has clinched the EIVA regular-season title, comes to town Friday. Princeton then wraps up its regular season on April 17 at George Mason.

“Our next games will be a lot harder,” Hamming said. “We beat St. Francis in a really close game earlier, so they might want to get us back.”