The Park University Gilbert women's volleyball team was disappointed with their performance in last Monday's season opener. Head coach Clay Webb attributed the loss to mistakes that Benedictine-Mesa capitalized.
"It was a solid team win. The energy on the sideline was outstanding and we did what we needed to in order to come away with the win."
The Buccaneers (2-1) did not allow those mistakes to happen a second time, as they swept Providence Christian College, 3-0 in back-to-back matches on Saturday.
The Sea Beggars (0-7) got off to a fast start and found themselves with a 6-3 lead in the early going. The Buccaneers fought their way back into the game and took their first lead of the match via attack error by the Sea Beggars. From there, the Bucs never looked back. The Bucs dominated the first set and carried that momentum with them through the rest of the match.
Miranda Bacon led the way for the Bucs with nine kills and eight digs. Freshman Amanda Jonovich tacked on seven kills and seven digs. On the back end, freshman libero Hattie Patton racked up eight digs.
The Buccaneers carried their momentum from the first match into the second and won the first two sets in dominating fashion. They took a 3-2 lead off of an attack error and did not fall behind again until set three, where the Sea Beggars gave the Bucs a run for their money.
The Sea Beggars led 21-15 in the third set- their biggest lead of the day. Then, the Bucs' resilience kicked in and went on a 11-3 run to complete the sweep.
The second match was led by some of the Bucs' usual suspects. Bacon and Jonovich topped their match one performances with 11 and 13 kills, respectively. They also added a combined 15 digs. Makenna Busse tacked on five kills of her own. Defensively, Gabriela Morales had 13 digs while securing the back end.
As a team, the Buccaneers had just 21 combined errors between the two matches. For comparison, they notched 29 in one match versus Benedictine-Mesa last Monday.
"I'm extremely happy with how we rebounded after a subpar performance in our first match," Webb said. "We still have things we need to get better at, but overall, we will watch ourselves on film and get back to work on Monday for another showdown with BenU."
The start time for the Bucs' matchup with Benedictine is 2 p.m.
