Image credit: TRU Athletics

By Larry Read - TRU Athletics

Canada West volleyball

WolfPack women’s volleyball open playoffs with a win.

Feb 21, 2020 | 5:44 AM

KAMLOOPS —-The Thompson Rivers University WolfPack rallied from a 1-0 deficit to take the opener of their best of three Canada West women’s volleyball playoff series with the MacEwan Griffins.

Playing at the David Atkinson gym in Edmonton, the Pack beat the hometown Griffins 3-1. The scores on Thursday night (Feb 20) were 18-25,25-20,25-23,25-19.

HIGHLIGHTS:

https://youtu.be/SA9s7cbAP2I

The WolfPack struggled with net violations and attack errors in the first set. But they regrouped and thanks to a 10-0 run fueled by a service run courtesy of Olga Savenchuk (2^nd year, outside hitter, Donetsk, Ukraine), they won the second set by five.

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Said WolfPack coach Chad Grimm about that run, “We needed something to spark it. I didn’t think we were playing poorly at the beginning of the match. I thought MacEwan was playing really good defence. We couldn’t get a ball to hit the floor. I thought our out shots were a little bit undisciplined. We weren’t doing what we needed to do. But we started to clean that up. Obviously with service pressure and getting a team out of system gives you an advantage. I thought our blocking defence started to be a little bit more disciplined. It’s hard when you can’t score on some balls and the wheels start to turn a little bit upstairs. Then you maybe start doing things you shouldn’t do because you’re impatient and I think that’s sometimes why teams go on runs.”

In the third set, the Pack were down 21-20 before coming back to win. That momentum spurred on the Pack and they jumped out to an early lead in the fourth and went onto victory.

Offensively, the WolfPack were led by Kendra Finch (5^th year, outside hitter, North Vancouver, BC). She had 14 kills in 63 attempts with 14 digs and a service ace.

Kseniya Kocyigit (1^st year, middle, Byaroza, Belarus) had 11 kills in 26 swings with two solo blocks, an assist and a service ace. Grimm felt she was a big influence, “I thought we were a little bit tentative and little bit undisciplined there in the beginning, but she’s calm, she’s energetic, she’s bringing the girls up. She’s been in big matches before. She made some plays for us when she needed to and obviously that helps relax the girls when we’re starting to make some plays and things are looking more positive.”

Avery Pottle (4^th year, middle, Uxbridge, ON) contributed six kills in 18 chances with three service aces and three block assists. Savenchuk finished with six kills in nine chances with four block assists, 25 digs and to solo blocks.

“Olga defensively was great,” praised Grimm. “ I thought Kendra did her normal good job back there and our reception was good.”

Anastasiia Muzyka (3^rd year, setter, Poltawa, Ukraine) had 35 assists, 14 digs and had four kills in nine chances. Both Thompson Rivers liberos: Hali Drezet (4^th year, Prince George, BC) and Katie Ludvig (3^rd year, Kamloops, BC) had 11 digs.

He added, “Normally Kendra doesn’t served a lot of balls because she is such a strong passer. But I thought Olga and Hali did a tremendous job of handling tough serves. When the serve wasn’t so tough they put us in a place where we could really start to run our offense.”

MacEwan had six service aces in the contest compared to three for TRU. Both teams had 11 service errors.

The Griffins main offensive threats were McKenna Stevenson with 13 kills in 36 chances with a service ace. Hailey Cornelis had 12 kills in 43 opportunities. Haley Gilfillan and Mariah Bereziuk each had six kills. Gilfillan had 23 chances while Bereziuk had 28 swings. Gilfillan added two service aces. Kylie Schubert had 31 assists and 11 digs. Rachel Jorvina had 23 digs while Carly Weber had five kills in 34 opportunities and had 13 digs.

Game two of the series is Friday (Feb 21) at 6 PM MDT again at MacEwan. Grimm added ““It’s obviously good to win the first match. It’s going to be a tough series. We threw the first punch, but we know all too well that things can change. Last year, we went into Alberta and won the first match. They turned the tides and won the next two. Hopefully, we’ve learned a lesson from that, but the good news is no matter what happens, we’ve got two shots. We need to come out tomorrow and play like it’s the deciding game because you win two and you move on. We’re going to have a challenging match tomorrow.”