#25 Marquette Gets Crushed By #17 Creighton

As we elaborated in the preview for Sunday’s Marquette volleyball match, there was a lot on the line for the Golden Eagles in Omaha against #17 Creighton.

Apparently “we can get revenge for a sweep loss in Milwaukee” was a much better motivation as the Bluejays kind of blew the #25 ranked Golden Eagles off the floor for two straight sets and held on to beat Marquette in the third for the 3-0 result. With that officially on the board, Marquette, Creighton, and St. John’s are all tied atop the Big East standings at 12-2 with four matches each to play.

Set #1: The Bluejays went up 8-3 and 10-4 in the early going, and then 16-9 in the middle-ish. If that wasn’t convincing, a 4-0 burst pushed the margin to 23-15 and Creighton just coasted it in from there. MU hit just .118 in the frame against .368 for CU, and neither of those numbers are good for the Golden Eagles.

Set #2: Things got atrociously worse with MU failing to break into positive numbers on seven kills and 10 errors and the Bluejays hit .500. Creighton went up 7-2 out of the gate and outscored Marquette 18-7 the rest of the way for a very lopsided 25-9 win.

Set #3: With the match kind of settled barring a massive turnaround for Marquette, the Golden Eagles fell behind 5-1 right away. Even after trailing 11-6, MU did tie it at 12 and battled back after an 18-15 deficit to take a 20-19 lead. Marquette had it tied again at 22, 23, and 24, but that 24th point on a kill from Jenna Reitsma was the last of the match for the Golden Eagles, and kills from Kiana Schmitt and Ava Martin ended things at DJ Sokol Arena. I can not confirm at this time that the building was constructed on a hellmouth.

Nobody had a good day for Marquette, as Reitsma led with eight kills but hit just .207 and Aubrey Hamilton was a little bit worse at seven kills and .192. Carsen Murray and Anastasija Svetnik were both in negative numbers for hitting percentages, and Hattie Bray couldn’t do better than five kills and three errors on 18 swings.

I guess we could call the return of Yadhira Anchante to the lineup good news, as she played for the first time since contracting appendicitis. She had 20 assists on MU’s 27 kills, which is a good ratio but a bad total for three sets of Marquette volleyball.

Up Next: Marquette hits the road next weekend with an eye on securing two wins and keeping a Big East title in their grasp. They’ll be in D.C. on Friday night to face Georgetown and 23 hours later, they’ll be in Philadelphia to face Villanova. Want to hear something really stupid? Georgetown’s keeping the match on their personal streaming service and NOT on FloSports. How is this allowed?