The women’s volleyball team’s season ended in the NESCAC tournament semifinals Saturday, as the team fell to third seed Amherst in a close five-game match. A day earlier, the Cardinals had defeated Bowdoin in a four-game, first-round victory.
The Cards came into the Friday’s match with a lot of confidence, having swept Bowdoin just one week before. Wesleyan repelled the energized, confident opponent in four games: 31-29, 24-30, 30-28 and 30-25.
After putting Bowdoin behind them, the Cards’ attention turned to a semi-final match-up with Little Three rival Amherst. The teams split their two regular season meetings, and everything predicted a tough battle between two evenly matched squads.
Amherst came out strong, winning the first game with a score of 22-30. The Cards, however, didn’t roll over and pushed back in the second game, winning 30-25. The third game came down to the wire. Amherst pulled ahead at the very end for a 28-30 victory.
In the fourth game the Cards knew it was do or die – and they did, pulling out a strong 30-23 victory. The match then went to a final tie-breaking game to 15 points. The Cards delivered a valiant effort but fell short by three points, dropping the game 12-15 and losing the match 2-3.
“We played great against Amherst,” said Ellie Healy ’10. “It really could have gone either way; we were with them the entire match but just couldn’t finish it out.”
The Cards played extremely well in what proved a fitting pinnacle to a successful season. Individually, several players continued to shine. Co-captain Caroline Rober ’08 turned in the strongest performance of her career with a tally of 24 kills and a dominant .500 hitting percentage.
Healy pulled past the 1,000 assist mark for the year, finishing with a grand total of 1,024. Lisa Drennan ’09 added 28 kills to her season total of 524, surpassing the previous team record of 4.79 per game by Eliza Allen ’03 in 2001. Her kill total places her in the top 10 nationally in kills-per-game and earned her the NESCAC kills title.
Co-captain Tory Molnar ’07, the lone senior on the team, ended the season with a total of 441 digs, closing out her illustrious career with 1,887.
“I can’t say it wasn’t heartbreaking, but it was a really respectable way to end the season,” Molnar said. “If you’re going to lose we lost the right way: playing hard all the way to the end.”
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