The volleyball team came within four points of a trip to the NCAA Regional finals, but it couldn't muster enough offense to put a win in the books and, instead, watched its record-breaking season come to an end Friday night. Wellesley came from behind to defeat Tufts 3-2 in a five-set duel that saw the host Jumbos exit Cousens Gym for the final time in the 2008 season.
As the No. 2 seed and host of the regional round of the NCAA tournament, Tufts was favored to beat the No. 3 Blue -- a squad the Jumbos swept 3-0 in September -- this time around.
"When you are at this level of play, everyone is a good team," coach Cora Thompson said after the game.
The Jumbos looked comfortable on their home court early on, jumping ahead from the start and taking the first set 25-18. But the Blue pulled ahead by as many as five points in the second set, and while Tufts knotted the game at 20 and 21 points, Wellesley countered by notching the final four consecutive points for a 25-21 set victory.
Riding the offense of junior Dawson Joyce-Mendive and sophomore Caitlin Updike, who tallied 18 and 15 kills, respectively, the Jumbos seemed to be in the driver's seat as they took the third set by another 25-19 score.
The fourth set saw the Jumbos take a number of small leads, including one at 21-19, putting them in prime position to put the Blue away for good. But with its season on the line, Wellesley took a decisive timeout, a move that seemed to push the momentum in its favor. The Blue took the next four points and turned their two-point deficit into a 23-21 lead.
"Volleyball is a game of momentum, and Wellesley had all of it [at that point]," junior Brogie Helgeson said. "If we gave them points, they made us pay for it. We just failed to stop them."
"We always expected to put them away, but we still never got too comfortable with our leads," Thompson said. "Everyone is playing for their season at this point."
The lead was all the Blue needed, as they took a critical 25-23 win to knot the match score at 2-2 heading into the fifth and decisive set.
"When you lose points at the end of a game, it's tough to come back," senior tri-captain Stacy Filocco said. "The advantage of being an underdog is that you have nothing to lose, and [Wellesley] laid it all out there."
"It got everyone fired up just to smell the fifth set," Wellesley assistant coach Tom Wilson said.
The final set was a fitting end to a match in which neither team could completely control the momentum. The score was tied nine times and the lead changed hands another four.
After the teams locked the score at 10-10, the Blue jumped ahead 12-10 and never looked back. Despite twice coming back to within one point, the Jumbos could not muster the offense needed to retake the lead, losing the set and match 15-12.
"We had such high expectations," Helgeson said. "We thought that our average game would do it, but obviously it did not."
Helgeson contributed nine kills to the Jumbos' offense. Freshman Audrey Kuan led the defense with 19 digs, while seniors Maya Ripecky, tri-captain Natalie Goldstein and Filocco added 17, 16 and 13, respectively.
Tufts had difficulty handling Wellesley's offense, and despite recording nine total blocks, it was often unable to capitalize on long volleys and put decisive points away.
"They had good hitters, so they knew they would get some balls down on us," Filocco said. "We just didn't come up with blocks at the right times."
"We could never establish our middles, so we were always going up against forehands," Thompson said. "Their outside hitters were great and they mixed up the offense really well."
The Blue had four different players notch double-digit kills, with junior Alice Cummings, senior Jessica Duff, sophomore Samantha Du and senior Heather Mellquist posting 21, 20, 14 and 10, respectively.
"We have been riding our outside hitters quite a bit this year, so it helped tonight spreading things out," Wilson said.
Wellesley went on to the regional final Saturday night against Williams, which downed Tufts last weekend in the NESCAC semifinals. The NESCAC champion Ephs defeated the Blue 3-1 (27-25, 17-25, 25-23, 25-21) to advance to this weekend's NCAA Elite Eight in the Shirk Center in Bloomington, Ill.
The loss was just Tufts' fourth of the season and followed a 3-0 sweep over regionally seeded No. 7 Bridgewater State on Thursday by a 25-22, 25-13, 25-13 score.
Ending its season 29-4, the Jumbos still took pride in the fact that they had posted the best season in the program's history.
"Out of our four losses [this season], three went to five sets," Thompson said. "We could have been [32]-1. It was still a special season to host the NESCAC and NCAA tournaments."
"We ended the season with only four losses," Filocco said. "Few teams can say that. You just can't say enough about a season in which you win 29 games. We were No. 1 in New England all season, [and] we did have a great year."
