Men's Volleyball: Most experienced team in years is also EIVA dark horse

It wasn’t always pretty, though, as Princeton dropped the first set and won the fifth by a close 15-13 margin to eke out the victory 3-2. The Tigers then defeated NYU 3-1 on Saturday to build momentum going into Friday’s game against Saint Francis, where they will face this week’s EIVA defensive player of the week. They hope to maintain that momentum going into Saturday’s matchup against league favorite Penn State.

The Tigers were picked to finish third in the EIVA Preseason Coaches’ Poll this season, behind George Mason and Penn State. Having already dropped a match to George Mason, the upcoming match against Penn State on Saturday will be critical if the Tigers hope to have a chance at the tournament.

“I think we put a lot of pressure on ourselves that we didn’t really have to,” sophomore outside hitter Cody Kessel said after the loss to George Mason. “We’ve got pretty high expectations for ourselves that the rest of the world doesn’t really have for us yet, so we can kind of have the freedom to play as the underdog team, and George Mason just played a really good set and just outplayed us.”

Yet no one expected them to be the underdogs in the match against NJIT, in which they narrowly avoided defeat. The Tigers led in kills (60-52), blocks (13.5-5) and attack percentage (.350-.274), but 26 service errors kept NJIT in the game. Junior outside hitter Pat Schwagler recorded 24 kills and six blocks in the win, while sophomore middle blocker Will Siroky and senior middle blocker Michael Dye had a pair of aces apiece.

“We’ve been doing quite a bit of in-game situations, what we would call serve-and-pass, so we’ve basically been trying to model game-like situations,” Dye said. “[There’s] a little more pressure when you’re serving in a game, so that’s what we’ve been doing the past two or three days and hopefully that will lead to us doing better.”

In the NYU win, Schwagler continued his dominant play with 13 kills, while Kessel added 12 kills and six digs. Dye also displayed efficient hitting, recording a .571 attack percentage, and senior outside hitter Daniel Tien had three of the four Tiger aces in the match.

“Definitely one of our main strengths is our offense, all our hitters. Given that they’re having a good day, we could side out every point,” Dye said. “We all have days where we have incredibly high hitting percentages, so definitely I feel like our attacking is our greatest strength.”

The team views both victories this weekend as momentum builders for its road to the tournament, as it is now on a three-game win streak.

“We just try to play our best volleyball day in and day out and, in terms of bouncing back, I thought this weekend was pretty good for that,” Kessel said. “Squeaking out a win against NJIT, even when things weren’t really going well — we missed 26 serves, which was very unlike our team — but we still found a way to win and did other things well in our game. The win against NYU was good moving forward in terms of confidence. This weekend is going to be pretty big for us.”

With Harvard beating Penn State in three sets for the first time in five years, there’s certainly going to be a lot of fight from the few teams at the top, including Princeton, who have a chance at the EIVA final tournament. The Tigers are currently in fourth place in the EIVA standings and are currently on track to make the postseason tournament, as the top four teams in the conference participate in it.

“Last season, a lot of our mistakes were that we were overlooking games before we took care of business and lost a few games that way, so this year our entire goal was to make sure we beat everyone we were supposed to before looking forward to the game afterwards,” Dye said. “We’re going to start preparing for Penn State in the next couple of days, but we wanted to make sure we got Saint Francis out of the way first.”

The Tigers will take on Saint Francis and Penn State on the road this weekend at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.