Pitt dumps Seton Hall to break skid

If head volleyball coach Chris Beerman had it his way, he wouldn’t even notice when his… If head volleyball coach Chris Beerman had it his way, he wouldn’t even notice when his freshman setter, Nicole Taurence, plays a great game.

Well, sort of.

“I think the quality of a setter is when you don’t notice her during the match. Things are running smooth when you don’t notice the setter and tonight I didn’t notice her,” he said after Taurence piled up a match-high 52 assists to help Pitt sweep the visiting Seton Hall Pirates Friday night.

“She’s doing a great job for us,” Senior outside-hitter Gini Ullery, who had a match-high 19 kills, said. “She’s very consistent and that’s what you need from a setter. She’s competitive and she’s pretty confident right now. She comes out wanting to improve and get better each day, and that’s the kind of player you want to play with.”

It would have been hard to ignore the play of Taurence, who also added three kills on the match, most of them coming on “dumps,” where she would elevate to set the ball but instead spike the ball past several leaping and confused Pirates at the net.

“I usually don’t dump a lot, but they have been telling me to be more and more aggressive, so I just decided tonight, ‘You know what? It’s about time,'” Taurence said. “I was just trying to be a little more aggressive.”

Pitt won the first two games by identical 30-25 scores before claiming a hotly contested third game, 30-27, to sweep the Pirates for the third year. The win also snapped a two-game skid and moved the Panthers to 14-9 overall and 7-3 in the Big East.

“We’re taking it game by game. But I think every game is important,” Ullery said of the team’s rebound from road losses to Louisville and Cincinnati last weekend. “We had a rough weekend last weekend, but we came back strong. We had a good week of practice. We’ve just got to be ready for each game and take each game for what it’s worth.”

This sweep, however, was filled with errors on both sides of the net. The Panthers committed 19 attacking errors and 10 service errors on the night, several while trying to close out games, thus opening a window for the Pirates to climb back into each game.

“We didn’t play any defense in the first game at all,” Beerman said. “In the second and third games we started blocking and making plays. We still kind of play at the level of the team we play, unfortunately, and it’s not really the level, it’s the tempo. Seton Hall plays at a slow tempo. There wasn’t much energy coming from the other side of the net so we really had to create our own.”

The Panthers did surge to a quick start, however, sprinting to a quick 4-0 lead behind the play of Ashley White, who finished with 15 kills on the night. The Panther hitters had to adjust to an aggressive Seton Hall defense, however, one that registered 12 blocks on the night, and control their hits a little more carefully.

On several occasions, Pitt’s hitters would rise to spike only to be met at the next by one or two Pirate defenders, also airborne. Ullery and fellow outside-hitter Diana Andreyko (17 kills on the match) adjusted by tapping balls over the outstretched arms of defenders or simply placing shots around them to vacant areas of the court.

“I think that’s what makes you a smart hitter, by being able to hit around people and hitting the spots that you know where they won’t be,” Ullery said. “It’s tough, but as you get older and you get experience, those shots get easier and you have to keep mixing it up.”

Pitt also used a strong serving game to its advantage. Despite the errors, Seton Hall had difficulty returning the Panthers’ serves, from the short ones of libero Megan McGrane to the rockets coming from the jump serve of Andreyko.

Beerman has pointed to Pitt’s serving as one of the team’s biggest improvements from last year, as he recalls last year’s team to be one of “the worst in the conference,” at the time.

“We’ve really been mixing it up better,” he said Friday. “We’ve had much more aggressive serving and now Stephanie Ross comes in and jump-serves. McGrane is staying down, she’s not doing the jump-floater but I’m giving her signals now and she’s hitting those targets really well.”

He added, “If we can serve tough, that just adds a whole other element. I actually thought Seton Hall passed very well tonight, so they played pretty solid.”

One thing he wasn’t pleased with, however, was the way the game ended, which was a suitable climax to a rather sloppy game. With Pitt clinging to a 29-27 lead, and the Pirates in the midst of a 5-1 run, a ball hit off a Seton Hall defender and grazed the out-of-bounds antennae on the side of the net, which gave Pitt the point and the victory.

“You just don’t want to finish that way,” Beerman said. “You want to finish with an exclamation point, you want to win the game. You don’t want to just kind of back into it.”

He wasn’t about to dwell on it, however, especially with it being a conference win and the Panthers gearing up for this weekend when DePaul and rival Notre Dame come to town.

“Right now in the Big East you’ve just got to win, so I’m not going to make a deal about it,” he said.