The Wesleyan volleyball team came into the Fall 2025 season hungry to prove themselves. After years of dominance, the Cards took a step back in 2024, struggling to find an identity as a team heavily composed of fresh faces. They finished with a 14–11 overall record (7–3 in conference), were eliminated in the NESCAC Semifinals, and did not qualify for the Division III (D-III) NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2016. Now standing at 12–1 overall and an unbeaten 4–0 against NESCAC competition, the no. 21 Cards are definitely back to their winning ways, but with over half of the conference season still ahead, there’s a lot of volleyball to be played. For the team, the Fall 2025 season began in the spring, with the players working to build a cohesive unit to take back their reputation as the team to beat in the NESCAC.
“Last year, even though it wasn’t objectively bad, it wasn’t how we wanted to perform,” outside hitter Siena Steines ’28 said. “This year we came in with more of a drive, and we knew what we wanted to accomplish, especially over the spring season. Everybody, even people who didn’t have big roles last season, contributed so much over the spring season.”
Libero Elliana Moreno ’27 talked about the key focus of the spring season.
“It has always been communication,” Moreno said. “Last year we had so many freshmen [starting] on the court, so we weren’t really used to playing with each other. Building that bond and communication into this season has been really great.”
The Cards had even more reason to be excited. For the first time since the 2023 season, they would have captain and two-time NESCAC Player of the Year Sophia Lindus ’26 back on the court after she was sidelined with an ACL injury late in her sophomore season.
The season got off to a quick start with a three-match slate at the Roger Williams University Invitational on Friday, Sept. 5. The Cards took on Wheaton College first and took care of the Thunder in three easy sets: 25–10, 25–14, 25–12. Lindus made her presence known early, leading the team with 10 kills in her first match in 671 days.
“This whole season has been kind of a personal journey of dealing with my own nerves [after] tearing my ACL when I was two-time Player of the Year and then coming back,” Lindus said. “It was really nice to have those out-of-league games [to see] what can this team do right now. What are we actually capable of?”
The Cards kept the ball rolling by holding off the host Roger Williams in another 3–0 win (25–15, 25–18, 25–20), and they finished the opening weekend with a dominant win over Simmons University (25–10, 25–11, 25–12). In the third set, the Sharks threatened, pulling within one at 10–9, but the Cards slammed the door, scoring 15 out of the last 18 points to take the win and end the weekend with 3 shutout victories.
“It was nice to just have the first initial games where we could get the jitters out and just play together,” Moreno said. “We were focusing on our side: handling our routine balls so that when we actually played really tough teams, it would translate into those games.”
Next, the Cards traveled to Swarthmore, Penn. for the Garnet Invitational. Anxious to get onto their revenge tour, the Cards were still glad to have another three-game set to make sure all parts of their game were firing on all cylinders. Against Susquehanna University, it was more of the same. Wes poured it on in a 25–11 first set, took the second 25–17, and showed some fight in a contentious third, taking the match with a 25–21 finisher. Steines led the way with a 13-kill, 18-dig double-double, a career high in digs for the outside hitter.
The hosting Swarthmore Garnets presented Wesleyan’s biggest challenge of the young season. The Garnets, coming off a Centennial Conference runner-up, held steady with the Cards in the first set and at 20–20, rattled off five of six to hand Wes their first lost set of the year. Unshaken, Wes regrouped and came back hard in the second and third, firing back 25–14 and 25–16, bringing the match to a fourth set. In the fourth, the Cards began to falter, conceding five consecutive points to bring it to 22–21. However, trusting in their system, Steines assisted a Kiera Sweetnam ’27 kill and rattled off two of her own to take the match with a 25–22 final set. Steines and Lindus each recorded 14 kills, thanks in large part to captain and setter Ali Landa ’26, who made 33 assists in her fifth consecutive 20-assist game.
“Swarthmore was our first test of, ‘Can we be good under pressure?” Steines said. “With that game, it never felt like we were going to lose because even after we lost the second set, it was just, ‘Let’s move on.’ We know how to play volleyball. We trust our training and how much discipline we’ve put into our system.”
Wes finished the weekend with a skilled win over Skidmore College (25–14, 25–15, 25–20), notching their fifth sweep of the season and improving to 6–0.
After two weekends on the road, the Cards finally returned to the familiar Silloway Gymnasium to take on the no. 13 Colby Mules on Friday, Sept. 19. The Cards suffered a sweep at the hands of the Mules in ’24, so a win would go a long way in showing that this team was serious.
Lindus was glad to return to playing on her home court.
“It’s so nice to play in Silloway, because we just have such a good crowd that wants to support us and watch our games,” Lindus said. “As my friend Alex Justh [’26] on the basketball team said, ‘It must be really terrifying for an away team to come into that gym.’”
Wes hung on in a back-and-forth first set, eventually taking it 25–20, but the Mules fired back in the second, taking an early lead and tying the match as the Cards fell 16–25.
“I remember taking my team together and being like, ‘We know we can correct ourselves and bring the energy up into the next set,’ and we just cleaned the slate off,” Moreno said. “We knew that’s not how we played. We were just going to do better in the next set.”
The third was still close, as down the stretch, the Cardinals found themselves down 19–20, looking for a burst. Taking advantage of errors by Colby, Wes took the lead and took six of the last eight points to win the set 25–22. In an already heavily contested match, the fourth set brought the competition level up a few notches still. Neither team led by more than three throughout the set, and down the stretch, the score was knotted at 20. A Lindus kill and a block by middle hitter Katelyn Olin ’27 gave them a slight cushion at 22–20, but it wasn’t enough, as the score ended up tied at 25, sending the set into extra points. After four consecutive lead changes in eight points, tied at 28 apiece, Olin ended the game with a kill followed by a block to give the Cards the 30–28 win.
Even though the match was tight, the Cards were confident all along.
“On the court, it never felt like we were down,” Steines said. “It felt very much like, ‘We know we’re gonna get out of this, because we’ve proven time and time again that we can get out of it, and we’ve trained to do that.’”
The next day, Bowdoin came to Middletown to try to take down the Cards. Longtime fans might remember the Bowdoin curse, when the Polar Bears won four straight against Wes over an otherwise incredibly successful 3-year span, but on Saturday, Sep. 20, the Cards showed that the curse—if there ever even was one—is long gone. With the win, Wes improved to 8–0 on the year and 2–0 in-conference.
They took care of business, handily defeating the Polar Bears 25–15 in all three sets, never holding a lead later than the eighth point. Moreno was particularly dominant, posting 21 digs and four service aces. For her performance over the weekend, Moreno was named the NESCAC Player of the Week, just the fourth libero in program history to win the award.
Before returning to NESCAC play, the Cards took on no. 6 Johns Hopkins University in a rematch of the third round of the 2023 NCAA Tournament, in which the Cards fell to the Jays 0–3. Wes pushed hard in the first two sets but was not quite able to get over the hump, losing 22–25 and 25–27, respectively. The third set was all Cards as they jumped out to an early 11–3 lead and stayed strong, taking the set 25–19, but in the end it wasn’t enough, as the Jays took the fourth set, handing the Cards their first loss of 2025.
“We took a lot of positives from that game,” Steines said. “We were able to look at that and say, ‘Okay, this is what we messed up on. If we fix this, we’re right back at it with them.’ I have no doubt if we play them in the tournament, I think we can take a very strong fight to them and come out of it on top.”
The next day, the Cards got back to their winning ways, taking care of Endicott College in three sets (25–14, 25–22, 25–16). Outside hitter Mila Chan ’28 had a day, recording 11 kills on a ridiculous .647 hitting percentage, making the Gulls pay practically every time she touched the volleyball.
The second weekend of NESCAC play saw the Cards drive down the road to see two in-state rivals, Conn. College and Trinity.
In the first set, Wes couldn’t find a meaningful lead, waiting until it was 17–17 to make their move and take the first set 25–19. The second was even closer, with the Cards finding themselves down 23–24 before a Camels error and two kills by Steines earned them the set 26–24. In the third, they were unable to close it out, losing the set 24–26, but in the fourth, they had what it took to close out the match with a 25–20 win. Steines put in an incredible performance with 21 kills in her first career 20-kill game. She was the first Cardinal to hit that mark since Lindus in 2023.
Shaking off any strange feeling from the previous day, the Cards took it to Trinity hard, ripping the Bantams in three sets (25–19, 25–11, 25–17). The win marked the 11th straight against the Bantams dating back to 2015, significant bragging rights for two programs with no love lost between them. Moreno tacked on another accomplishment to her season as well, anchoring the defense with a career-high 27 digs.
“We were on it,” Moreno said. “Our serve-receive and serving was really good, and the energy was just there. Our team felt very connected.”
With that, the Cards headed to Manhattan on Sunday, Oct. 5 to take on New York University, a team that Wesleyan had never beaten dating back to their first meeting in 1998. Gearing up for a battle, the Cards came out of the gate firing on all cylinders. They put together the best set of their entire season, absolutely destroying NYU 25–4, highlighted by three aces in four points by setter Alexa Schnell ’29. The Cards didn’t take their foot off the gas, jumping to a 13–4 lead in the second set and taking it 25–17. They closed it out with a 25–14 set to beat the historically unbeatable Violets.
“Being in the city, all of our alums are in the city too, and all of our friends who graduated are there,” Lindus said. “So we had a huge cheering section for us. And it was so nice to talk to them after the game too, because they were like, ‘You guys finally did it. You guys finally beat NYU.’”
Tonight at 7 p.m., the Cardinals take on Hamilton, looking to keep the momentum going.
“Everyone’s very on top of their system responsibilities and it just feels very well-oiled at this point,” Lindus said. “Obviously, there are bumps that we have to figure out, but nothing is so out of whack that it’s going to set us back this season. We have a lot of talent, potential, and depth on our team. If our starters are not playing well, we can throw in someone on the bench and they can do equally as well. We’re really excited for finishing out the regular season strong and then going to the postseason. I think that we’re proving to ourselves that we are a good team that can compete with other really good teams, and we just want to continue that mentality.”
Ethan Lee can be reached at ejlee@wesleyan.edu.
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