KIRKLAND, Wash. – The Carroll College volleyball team rallied from a 2-0 set deficit to win 21-25, 18-25, 25-21, 25-17, 15-10 in its season opener, on the road at Northwest University Wednesday evening.
Brielle Bumgarner led the way with 15 kills on a .382 hitting percentage while freshman
Ayla Carpenter tallied 14 kills with a .220 hitting percentage for an impressive debut in a Carroll Uniform and
Paige Montgomery notched 15 kills with a .194 hitting percentage.
Bumgarner also tallied four blocks while
Holly Morehouse tallied three to go with 12 kills on a .200 hitting percentage.
Senior
Jonni Dorr tallied 49 assists to pace the offense and senior
Natalie Kassa notched 24 digs to lead the way on the back line.
"Jonni did a great job running our offense," head coach Moe Boyle said. "She put the ball right where it needed to be. Even when we were out of sync to begin the match, she played extremely well."
The Saints finished the night with a .221 hitting percentage as a team but it looked bleak early. Carroll tallied as many errors as kills in the first set, 10 each, for a .000 hitting percentage. The second set wasn't much better with a .093 (12 kills, eight errors).
In the second set, Carroll trailed 19-9 before going on a 7-0 run with Kassa at the service line, it wouldn't be enough to win the set but it sparked the Saints on.
"It was really ugly for a while; we are certainly not where we want to be right now. I really thought that we might have been written off after the first two," Boyle said. "But we felt the momentum shift, somewhere in game two the momentum shifted. When we switched sides from game two to game three it didn't feel like we were down 2-0, it felt, at least to us, that we were still in the match."
The Saints tallied a total of eight hitting errors for the final three sets of the match, including just one in the final set, earning 13 kills in the final frame.
"We were focused on just doing our jobs and the girls showed a lot of fight and determination," Boyle said. "That is the part you can't coach. If they have that fire, we can work with the rest."
The Saints travel to Olympia to play Evergreen Thursday evening at 5 p.m.
