Women's Volleyball: Three wins not enough to keep title hopes alive

Competing in four games over Fall Break, the Tigers (9-13 overall, 7-4 Ivy League) played at home on Halloween weekend against Brown and Yale, and they followed up a week later with a sweep of Cornell and Columbia on the road.

A constant thorn in Princeton’s side since it cost the Tigers the championship title last year, Yale continued to give the Orange and Black trouble. The Bulldogs’ dominating three-set win over the Tigers ensured that Princeton will not get a chance at the conference championship this year. The Bulldogs are currently second in the league behind Penn, which clinched a share of the Ivy League title with a win over Cornell on Saturday.

Despite the unfortunate conclusion to their weekend, the Tigers began with a sweep of Brown (5-17, 1-10), their first three-set victory of the season. Princeton hit the court with a vengeance, hitting a solid .400 while holding Brown to just two points to the Tigers’ 12 in the final half of the game. The impressive first game, which Princeton won 25-16, set the pace for the rest of the night, as Tiger hitters outplayed the weak Brown offense to end the second set, 25-15, and the third, 25-14. Overall, Princeton hit .389 for the match and had four players with at least 10 kills.

“They are really good defensively, so we had to work on hitting in different places and switching up our offense so they couldn’t dig our kills,” freshman outside hitter Lydia Rudnick said. “Any team can come back and gain momentum to win a game, but we stayed strong and never let them creep up on us.”

Saturday’s match against Yale (18-4, 8-3) looked surprisingly similar to the Brown match, except this time the Tigers were the ones losing every set by 10 points. After a tough loss to unbeaten Penn the night before, the Bulldogs bounced back by dominating Princeton in every category of play. Yale hit .285 throughout the match to the Tigers’ .071, a statistic that included a negative hitting percentage in the first set and a zero hitting percentage in the second. The Bulldogs had eight aces to Princeton’s one and went on a 12-point run in the second set.

“If you look at the score, it definitely looks [like they blew us out], but they didn’t do anything we didn’t expect them to do. We just weren’t doing our job,” sophomore middle blocker Cathryn Quinn said. “We shot ourselves in the foot because we couldn’t pass and we couldn’t run the offense.”

Currently the Bulldogs are the only team that has won four consecutive matches against Princeton, and it’s not because Yale is infallible. On Saturday, the Bulldogs fell to Dartmouth, who the Tigers beat twice this season.

After the debilitating loss to Yale, Princeton headed to New York the following weekend and started off with a match against Cornell (6-16, 3-8). While the Tigers seemingly couldn’t do anything right against the Bulldogs, against the Big Red they were flawless, sweeping Cornell, 25-20, 25-18, 25-17.

“When we played Cornell, we were very steady,” Rudnick said. “We never let them get very many runs, and we spread everything out. It was one of the better matches we played.”

The momentum from the win against the Big Red, combined with Columbia’s abysmal performance thus far in the season — the Lions (11-14, 2-10) are second to last in the Ivy League — seemed to guarantee that Princeton would crush its competition. In spite of what was stacked against it, however, Columbia proved with a 25-23 victory in the first set that it was here for the win.

“I’m not really sure what happened during the first game,” Quinn said. “[Columbia has] a new coach and a couple of really talented freshman, and they’ve taken a couple of games from people unexpectedly. They were playing very good defense in the first set, whereas I don’t think we were digging as many balls.”

After battling it out in the first game — the set was tied a total of 11 times throughout — the Tigers came back from an early 2-0 deficit to take the win, 25-15. Princeton took control of the following two sets to earn the win.

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The player largely responsible for the Tigers’ turnaround was senior outside hitter and co-captain Sheena Donohue, who led the offense with 22 kills and 24 digs. Closest behind Donohue in scoring was Rudnick, who recorded 16 kills and 12 digs.

Princeton is no longer in the running for a championship, and with Penn looking like it will have a perfect season, even a win against Yale may not have been enough for a chance at the title. But the Tigers are far from giving up on the season. With just three matches remaining, Princeton will fight to hold on to a third-place standing and prove that whatever mental blocks it had against Yale will not stop it from finishing the year strong.