BROOKINGS — The South Dakota State volleyball team came away with another sweep on Thursday night as the Jackrabbits beat North Dakota State in straight sets at First Bank & Trust Arena.
It was a battle of unbeatens in the Summit League as each team was 5-0 in conference play coming into Thursday night. The Jacks are now the only team without a blemish on their conference record.
“We did a good job of just hanging in there. Both teams played with high error tonight and both teams struggled to score. … We scored well, with 11 aces, which is a season-high and that’s [great] in a three-set match. We made up some points on an off night with our serve and our block and I think we just stayed gritty,” head coach Dan Georgalas said.
SDSU has had five or more aces in six-straight matches and the Jacks’ top two outputs in that category have come in the past three games. Georgalas said serving has been something they’ve been working on and there’s three things that have gone into the high number of aces lately.
“We’re really trying to focus on three attributes [when we serve]. Our float, our trajectory and the zone on the court that we’re trying to go after. We call it FTZ and I thought our group did a good job of being efficient and aggressive. We really tried to pick on some things that we saw in a scouting report that would bring them into what we call a one pass offense, and we did that,” Georgalas said.
SDSU led 5-2 in the first set and NDSU scored four of the next five points to tie things up at 6-6. NDSU then led 12-10 and the Jacks came back to go up 18-16. It was then 19-19 and SDSU scored four-straight points and eventually won the set 25-21.
The Jacks led 6-3 early in the second set. SDSU then led 15-13 and the Bison scored two-straight points to tie things up. It was then 17-17 and the Jacks scored four-straight points. They held that lead and won the set 25-22.
The third set played out exactly like the previous two. SDSU had a 17-13 lead and a 4-0 run from the Bison tied things up. Georgalas called timeout and the Jacks responded with an 8-1 run and won the match with a 25-18 victory.
Georgalas called timeouts late in all three sets and each time his team responded. He thought they did a good job of taking in the information that was being told to them during the timeouts.
“I thought we did a good job of executing out of timeouts. We call it trying to win the timeout. Take the feedback that the coaching staff is giving you and executing it in the next play. A lot of times you saw a service ace out of timeout. I was really happy with all of that. They really took our direction and executed it well,” Georgalas said.
SDSU had 36 kills and 47 digs as a team. Sylvie Zgonc had eight kills and nine digs. Madison Burr had eight kills and Hannah Klein and Sydni Schetnan each had seven kills. Rachel Wieber had 15 digs and Joslyn Richardson had 11 digs. Rylee Martin had 26 assists and seven digs.
SDSU will travel south to Vermillion on Saturday to take on South Dakota. First serve is set for 6 p.m. Georgalas said it’s challenging having both of SDSU’s rivalry matches in a span of three days but his team is looking forward to the challenge.
“This is a tough stretch. Seven out of the nine schools [in the conference] have five matches in 10 days, and we have two of our biggest rivalries two days apart. We’re trying to take it one game at a time. We tried to go lighter on reps this week, just knowing how much volume we’re going to have coming up, but we’re excited. This is just one step of many this week and we’re going to keep chipping away,” Georgalas said.
