Senior outside hitter Macey Gardner became the tenth ASU volleyball player to reach the 1,000 kill and 1,000 dig career milestone in a 3-1 victory over NAU in four sets.
“For me, it doesn’t really matter,” she said about her newest statistical accomplishment. “I just hope we can return the ball… (but) it’s definitely an honor.”
The No. 10 Sun Devils had to recover after hitting -.079 as a team in the second set.
This was a huge change from set one, in which ASU didn’t have a single error until its 25th hit attempt. After only hitting two in the first set, ASU had 10 in the second.
ASU head coach Jason Watson said his team had an uncharacteristic amount of errors.
“(It’s) probably a function of fatigue, being that it’s our fourth match (in five days),” he said.
ASU struggled defensively in that set as well. Digs were inaccurate; many were not in places setters could make a play.
Communication was lacking; in one play, junior outside hitter Cassidy Pickrell and sophomore libero Halle Harker both ran after a ball. Harker didn’t hear Pickrell calling her off until the last second. The ball was meekly hit at Pickrell and fell to the ground.
The Lumberjacks (5-2) went on an 11-2 run to take a 15-5 lead. They ran away with the set, winning 25-13 after dropping the first set 25-17.
“We just got caught in a rotation,” Gardner said. “We weren’t able to side out. ... Either we wouldn’t get a pass and we wouldn’t score, or we would get a pass and we just couldn’t connect with the hitters.”
A rotation that worked well was with senior middle blocker Whitney Follette serving and Gardner, senior middle blocker Mercedes Binns and junior outside hitter BreElle Bailey at the net.
It’s a huge change from last year. Follette was a poor server; she was often subbed out when the rotation put her in the serving spot.
This year, she’s been consistent. She only had one error tonight, and she had an ace.
“That was the missing piece (with the rotation), how well is (Follette) going to go serve,” Watson said. “She’s serving really well, much, much better than last year.”
Bailey was spectacular defensively on the right side of the net. She broke her record in solo blocks (four) and finished the game with 10 blocks total.
Four of them came in a six-point span in the final set. She and Follette assisted each other on the block for consecutive plays to boost the score to 10-7. Two plays later, Bailey got a solo block. On the next play, she assisted a block with Binns.
Bailey said that in the first two sets, she wasn’t rotating to the hitter she was guarding quickly enough. She adjusted over the break after the second set and came out strong.
“(Watson) told me to find the hitter a little sooner,” Bailey said. “Once I got on my hitter, things just started clicking and I started blocking.”
It wasn’t the only change made following set two. In the first two sets, Pickrell had 20 attempts. Gardner had eight.
“The disappointing thing for that is that I think she had this nice little mismatch that we could exploit and we kept going away from it,” Watson said.
The team adjusted, and Gardner had 14 attempts in the third set alone. The team needs to work on balancing out the spread; either Pickrell gets a lot of looks and Gardner gets almost none, or Gardner gets them all.
ASU captured the next two sets 25-13 and 25-20 to seal the match.
"Tonight it seemed like it was feast or famine sort of thing with our distribution to Macey,” Watson said. “It was either nothing or everything.”
Binns’ incredible accuracy continued. She had seven kills on 11 attempts with no errors. She showed skill at adjusting to low passes. Freshman setter Kylie Pickrell seems to not quite be in rhythm with the 6’3 middle blocker, but Binns adjusted in the air and hit the ball to open holes on the floor.
“At times we were reflective of as good as we’ve been playing and at times we looked like a work in progress,” Watson said.
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