Rutgers volleyball spent Friday morning at Knights Hall doing most of the things a box score rewards. The Scarlet Knights won the kill count 67-61. They out-hit Purdue Fort Wayne .296 to .293. Across five sets, they scored 113 points to the Mastodons’ 112.
They lost anyway.
Rutgers took the first two sets and dropped the next three, falling 25-23, 25-20, 23-25, 24-26, 16-18 in the opening match of the Bellarmine Classic. The Scarlet Knights held two match points in the fifth and converted neither,
spelling a rocky start for this season.
A Fast Two Sets in Knights Hall
The opener was tighter than the final score suggested. Rutgers built a 23-18 lead, then watched Purdue Fort Wayne rip off five straight points to tie it at 23. Imani Howell, the sophomore middle blocker ended the argument with back-to-back kills for a 25-23 set.
The second was the best volleyball Rutgers played all morning. The Scarlet Knights hit .524, converting 15 kills on 21 swings with four errors, and never trailed. Karis Willow, the Penn State transfer, put down three kills in the closing stretch. Lily Bolen served consecutive aces to push a one-point edge to 15-12. Howell finished it again, 25-20.
Two sets in, Rutgers had 29 kills on 54 swings and a .315 clip, and looked all but ready to close out an easy win.
Trinity Rye Found the Floor
Despite the efforts of Rutgers, it was Purdue Fort Wayne sophomore Trinity Rye who was the breakout star. Rye had reached 20 kills in a match exactly once in her career, last November against Wright State. She had 27 on Friday, marking what could be the beginning of a massive season.
Rye and junior Riley Rosneck, the 2024 Horizon League Freshman of the Year, combined for 46 of the Mastodons’ 61 kills. Setter Lili Smith fed them 48 assists and added six aces herself. Purdue Fort Wayne’s offense narrowed to two arms and got better for it.
The third set opened 4-0 in the Mastodons’ favor, two Smith aces inside the first four points, and Rutgers spent the rest of it chasing. Down 16-22, the Scarlet Knights won seven of the next nine, including four in a row, to pull within 23-24. Then Skylar George’s serve went long. Set, Purdue Fort Wayne.
The fourth followed the same shape at higher volume. Tied 11-11, Rutgers surrendered six consecutive points, three of them Smith aces, to fall behind 11-17. Howell answered with two aces of her own. Rutgers ground back to 24-24 on an Aspen Maxwell swing set by George, of all people, before Rye put down a kill and Rosneck served an ace to take it 26-24.
Two Points From 1-0
Rutgers trailed 12-14 in the fifth and won three straight with a Rye service error, a Rye attack error stuffed by Natalie Robinson and Willow, and a Willow kill off Brooke Baldwin’s hands. That made it 15-14 and put the Scarlet Knights on match point.
Howell served long.
A Miona Dimitric service error at 16-15 handed Rutgers a second match point. Willow’s attack sailed. Rosneck put down a kill. Then Smith and Bella DiBuono closed the block on Willow, and the Mastodons had an 18-16 fifth set and the match.
Stats Breakdown
George, the redshirt junior outside hitter from Houston and a Syracuse transfer, and Malia Romes, the freshman middle blocker led Rutgers with 14 kills apiece. Maxwell, the junior star who posted the most kills per set by a Scarlet Knight since 2009 last season, added 11 on .381 hitting. Howell finished with 10 kills on .529, three aces and four block assists. Robinson went 6-for-9 without an error for a .667 clip. Six Scarlet Knights reached six kills. That is the balance Rutgers wants. It also came with 25 attack errors.
The setting arrangement is worth watching. Bolen, the junior, took nearly every rotation last season on the way to 1,068 assists, the most by a Scarlet Knight since 2012, and averaged 9.00 per set in Big Ten play, a program record for a conference season. On Friday she split the job. Brooke Baldwin, the true freshman setter, finished with 30 assists and a team-high nine digs. Bolen had 26, plus three aces and six digs. Both were on the floor for all five sets.
For Purdue Fort Wayne, Rye finished with 29.5 points and Rosneck 20.5. Becky Barrett dug 17 balls and Smith added eight.
What Didn’t Work
Rutgers served 15 errors against nine aces. Purdue Fort Wayne nearly matched that, at 16 and 10. The difference was when they came. A Rutgers service error ended the third set. Another erased the first match point of the fifth.
The blocking gap was the one place the sheet split cleanly. Purdue Fort Wayne finished with 9.0 total blocks to Rutgers’ 7.0, and DiBuono alone accounted for 4.0 of them. Rutgers also piled up 25 attack errors to the Mastodons’ 20, concentrated in two places: George’s 14 kills came with seven errors on 33 attempts for a .212 clip, and Willow’s eight came with five errors on 19.
The digs deserve a second look. Both teams finished with 44, but Purdue Fort Wayne got 17 of theirs from Barrett alone. Rutgers spread the work across Baldwin’s nine, Kami Dyrstad’s seven and Bolen’s six. Dyrstad, the freshman libero out of Papillion-La Vista South and Nebraska’s Class A Player of the Year last fall, played all five sets to older sister Kenzie Dyrstad’s three. That rotation is still being sorted.
Rutgers gets host Bellarmine tonight at Knights Hall and Evansville on Saturday afternoon to close the Classic. Caitlin Schweihofer’s seventh Rutgers team returns its record-setting setter, its leading attacker and a deep newcomer class, and the first morning of the season showed a group that can out-hit a Horizon League opponent for two hours and still hand the match back. The rest of the weekend will either prove that this was a fluke of epic proportions, or a way to set the tone for the season.
