During this season for volleyball, Rutgers has had one night of evidence about its sustained success. Friday was about whether it could be the same team twice. Saturday asked something harder, whether Rutgers needed to be the same team at all.
Skylar George and Imani Howell, who between them played every set of Friday’s win over Delaware, did not play. Karis Willow came off the bench. Zharia Harris-Waddy, Avery Jesewitz and Jenna DeLaMater started, and Addison Wiemann and Kami Dyrstad got a set.
Saturday
night was the best one.
Rutgers swept Rider 25-20, 25-18, 25-15 in an hour and a half in front of 707, hit .378 as a team and held the Broncs to .165. Thursday’s sweep of Stony Brook came at .301. Friday’s four-set win over Delaware came at .193. Saturday was the cleanest attacking night of the weekend by a distance, and it came with the fewest familiar names on the floor.
Both Sets Tied at 7, Neither Tied Again
The first set was the only competitive one, and it stopped being competitive in a hurry. There were six ties and two lead changes, all of them inside the first 14 points. The last tie came at 7-7. Willow, subbed in, served the next four points and won three of them, back-to-back aces on Rylah Robinson and Maisie Nawrocki, then a set Katie Cook could not run, and Rutgers led 10-7.
Rutgers never gave that back.
Rider got within one at 18-17 and never got closer. Rutgers led 22-18, Rider scratched out two, and Willow ended the set with a kill off a Lily Bolen assist for 25-20. Rutgers hit .353 in the set, Rider .200.
The second set had exactly one tie and no lead changes at all. DeLaMater served the first five points of it, a Harris-Waddy solo block, a Nawrocki attack error, a Maxwell kill, her own ace, an Anja Kelly attack error, and Rutgers was up 5-0 before Rider scored. The Broncs got even at 7-7 and then spent the rest of the set behind.
Rider hit .059 in the second: eight kills, six errors, 34 swings. Rutgers led 22-15 after a Kenzie Dyrstad ace, allowed a small run, and Brooke Baldwin, the setter, put the set away herself with a kill off a Jesewitz assist. 25-18.
Down 3-6, Then the Dyrstad Sisters Arise
Rider’s best stretch of the night came at the start of the third. Molly Rohde served back-to-back aces for a 5-2 lead and the Broncs went up 6-3 on a Willow attack error.
Then Kenzie Dyrstad went back to serve and Rutgers scored five straight. An ace on Nawrocki, a Harris-Waddy kill, a Willow kill, another Harris-Waddy kill, a Rider timeout that did nothing, and a third Harris-Waddy kill. 9-6 Rutgers, three of the five finished by a player who had not touched the floor two nights earlier, all five on the serve of a libero who ended the match with three aces and 11 digs.
Rutgers hit .520 in the set, 15 kills, two errors, 25 attempts, and the margin only grew. Jesewitz aced for 18-12, Addison Wiemann came on and scored on her first swing for 21-12, and Rider missed five serves in the set, three of them inside the closing stretch.
The last of those handed the ball to Kami Dyrstad, Kenzie’s younger sister, who served at 22-13 in her only set of the weekend. Rider sided out on the first rally, which turned out to be the more forgettable half of her night: two points later she set the ball Wiemann put away for set point. Harris-Waddy ended the match on a Baldwin set, 25-15, and yet another win for Rutgers.
Stats Breakdown
Rutgers hit .378 for the match, 46 kills against 12 errors on 90 swings, and finished with a kill rate of .511, better than half of everything it put over the net ended the rally in its favor. Rider hit .165. The gap widened every set with .353 in the first, .290 in the second, .520 in the third, against Rider’s .200, .059 and .286. Rutgers sided out on 72.7 percent of its chances to Rider’s 52.1, and scored on 47.9 percent of its serves to Rider’s 27.3.
Serving was the one column neither team should keep. Rutgers hit seven aces and missed 10, and Rider hit six and missed nine. Kenzie Dyrstad accounted for three of Rutgers’ aces on her own, adding 11 digs and three assists from the back row, and Rider’s five service errors in the third set effectively ended the night’s suspense.
Zharia Harris-Waddy led everyone with 10 kills, no errors and 11 points, hitting .833 on 12 attempts. Malia Romes hit .467, Natalie Robinson .500 with one error on 12 swings, Aspen Maxwell .385 on 13. Robinson was also the best blocker in the building with one solo, four assists, five total blocks on a night Rutgers out-blocked Rider 6.0 to 4.0. Lily Bolen ran most of the offense with 22 assists and Brooke Baldwin added 16, against Makenna Mason’s 15 for Rider.
Rutgers won the dig count 35-25. On the other side, Maisie Nawrocki took 21 swings, more than anyone on the floor, and hit minus .190 with 10 total errors. Rylah Robinson was the only Bronc who looked comfortable, eight kills on 13 attempts at .538.
What Worked (And One Thing That Didn’t)
The rotation worked, which is the part worth writing down. Rutgers played a third match in three days, sat two of the players it had leaned on all weekend, gave a set apiece to Wiemann and Kami Dyrstad, and posted its cleanest attacking night of the week. Twelve attack errors on 90 swings. Harris-Waddy did not miss once in 12 attempts. Robinson was the best player on the floor at both ends of it.
The one thing that didn’t is the same thing that didn’t on Friday.
Karis Willow finished with eight kills, 10.5 points and the second-highest point total on the team. She also finished with eight errors, four attacking, four serving, the second-most by anyone in the building. She served two aces and missed four. She hit .267 on 15 swings on a night the two players who took a comparable number of swings hit .467 and .500. Willow is by no means a bad player. She has come up with huge plays. However, she has struggled with consistency at times in her first games as a Scarlet Knight.
This is also the shape of her weekend, not just her night. Against Delaware she hit .385 on the first ball and .125 in transition, served four consecutive aces and missed three. Against Rider she scored the kill that ended the first set and the kill that brought set point in the second, and gave back roughly as much in between. Rutgers is 6-2 with her producing that way.
The question is what it looks like when the opponent is good enough that the giveaways cost sets.
Rutgers is 6-2 and closes the homestand with on a hot streak, the last of them with a lineup it had not needed through the first eight matches. None of this week’s opponents was ever going to decide what this team is. The serve and the serve receive were going to decide that, and Saturday answered a question nobody had thought to ask yet, the answer holds up even when the names change. Next up is the Jack Kaiser Volleyball Classic in Queens this upcoming weekend with games against Bryant, Penn, and St. John’s.
