VINCENNES, Ind. – The Vincennes University volleyball team opened their 2024 postseason Wednesday night inside the Physical Education Complex.
The Trailblazers earned the No. 2 seed in this year’s NJCAA Division I Region 24 tournament and began their tournament against No. 7 seeded Kaskaskia College from Centralia, Ill.
VU overcame a slow start in set one to close out the quarterfinal matchup with a 25-18, 25-12, 25-13 sweep over the Blue Angels.
Vincennes got the night off to a rocky start, quickly falling behind 7-3 to begin set one before rallying back with five straight points to take an 8-7 lead.
Kaskaskia would regain the lead after four straight points at 16-15 before VU again responded back in front of the home crowd with a 9-1 scoring run to put the set away 25-18 and gain the 1-0 match lead.
The Trailblazers would continue this momentum into set two, where VU opened the second set with a 10-4 lead before using a big 8-0 scoring run to increase their advantage to 18-5.
Kaskaskia would continue to fight, cutting the deficit to eight at 20-12 before VU closed out the set strong with five straight to take set two 25-12 and gain a 2-0 match lead.
Vincennes was again able to break away early in set three, using an early 4-0 scoring run to take a 9-4 lead before gaining full control over the match with seven straight points to increase the lead to 19-8.
The Blue Angels battled to the end but were unable to overcome this big deficit as Vincennes claimed set three 25-13 and completed the three set sweep.
“I thought we had our down moment early on,” VUVB Head Coach Gary Sien said. “We had to take a step back and relax. I thought we were just a little bit tight at the beginning. But from that point on, early in the first set through sets two and three, it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot that could stop us tonight.”
“We talked about before the game of minimizing the errors and have as few errors as possible while staying aggressive and I thought we did that extremely well,” Sien added. “It’s always a difficult challenge in the postseason and Kaskaskia was coming in fresh off a match on Monday. But it was good that we were able to recover from that slow start pretty quickly and play with very few errors. It wasn’t errorless, but it was just great execution all the way around. We served extremely. Several of our servers had long scoring runs. We had an opportunity to just run our offense with only seven hitting errors in the entire match, which is just outstanding.”
