After spending nearly a month on the road facing stiff NESCAC opposition, the Tufts volleyball team is finally coming home after clinching its second consecutive regular-season NESCAC championship.
The Jumbos split a two-game set at Amherst last weekend, losing Friday's match-up to Trinity in five sets. Then, with the No. 1 seed in the conference tournament hanging in the balance, the team regained its composure to defeat Amherst.
To host the NESCAC post-season tournament, the Jumbos needed to dispatch the Lord Jeffs on Saturday afternoon. With their 3-1 victory in this match, Tufts finished the season in a three-way tie with 8-2 with Williams and Connecticut College for first place in the NESCAC standings. Because the Jumbos own the head-to-head tiebreaker against both of these teams, the postseason tournament will take place at Tufts for the second year in a row.
In the Amherst game on Saturday, the Jumbo offense functioned like a well-oiled machine. Junior Dawson Joyce-Mendive totaled 19 kills with only 3 errors on 35 attempts — an astounding season-high .457 kill percentage. Fellow outside hitter junior Caitlin Updike contributed a team-high of 22 kills, while on the defensive end sophomore libero Audrey Kuan stymied the Lord Jeff attack with 29 digs.
"On Saturday we came in with more focus, did more things right, executed a lot better, talked more, put more balls away," Updike said. "We were doing all of the things that make us a great team."
In the game against Trinity, the Jumbos were inconsistent offensively, converting only 15.7 percent of their kill opportunities. The game featured various shifts of momentum. Tufts dominated the second and fourth sets, outscoring Trinity 50-25 in those two contests, but the Bantams were able to excel in the pivotal moments, squeaking out the victory 15-8 in the fifth.
"Trinity is a very good team that has gotten better and better as the season has gone on," senior co-captain Dena Feiger said. "They have a lot of potential, and they proved it to us. They played a great game."
The game on Friday was Tufts' first encounter this season with the Bantams, a team that features a lot of young talent that has gained experience over the course of the season. The victory makes Trinity a dangerous opponent, and the dark horse contender in this weekend's post-season tournament.
"Trinity played out of their minds," senior co-captain Brogie Helgeson said. "That's what happens — we have a bullseye on our backs and people play harder against us. They have nothing to lose."
The Tufts offense sputtered against a large Trinity block on Friday, struggling to control the ball and execute its attack. While Feiger did have 50 assists in the contest, no Tufts player converted more than 26.7 percent of her kill attempts into scores. Joyce-Mendive and Updike, the Jumbos' two leading offensive presences this season, combined for 30 kills on 112 attempts, both performing under their season averages in kill percentage.
"Trinity didn't make many errors, and they did a good job of controlling the ball," coach Cora Thomson said. "They forced us to earn our points. It was clear that we [had to] work harder."
In the Jumbos' three losses this season, Joyce-Mendive has converted only 7.5, 11.4 and 11.4 percent of her kill opportunities. A good measure of the Jumbos' success this year has been the percentage of kill chances converted into points by Joyce-Mendive and Updike, which is in turn an indicator of the efficiency of the team's ball control.
The team finishes the regular season with a record of 26-3, and hopes to maintain its undefeated record in Cousens Gymnasium on Friday when it faces the No. 8 seed Wesleyan Cardinals in the quarterfinals of the NESCAC Tournament. While the Cardinals are the lowest seed in the tournament, a win is by no means assured as Wesleyan has pushed seven of its ten conference opponents to five sets.
While the Jumbos easily dispatched the Cardinals in the teams' previous matchup in September, the Cardinals have shown signs of improvement. Last weekend No. 3 seed Conn. College needed five sets to defeat the battle-tested Cardinals.
"Wesleyan is a different-looking team than the team we saw two months ago," Thomson said. "We know that even if we get a 2-0 jump on them, if we are not fully focused at the end it can slip away."
The Cardinals are the only team in this year's tournament with a conference record below .500, in what has been a remarkably even season within the NESCAC. This year is the first since 2004 that all eight teams in the tournament have entered with at least four wins on the season. Five out of the top eight teams in the Division III New England rankings are from the NESCAC and will be battling it out in Cousens for post-season supremacy.
"This season shows how strong every team in the NESCAC is, and speaks well for our overall dominance," Feiger said. "It shows how great the tournament this weekend will be."
And if this year's Jumbo team can emerge from the tournament with three hard-fought victories, it will achieve what no Tufts volleyball team has done since 1996: bring home the NESCAC tournament title.
