He confirmed with the referee, then quipped that he didn’t plan on using either.
He used both. The Colonials finished the fourth set on a 6-1 run to win it, then triumphed in a marathon fifth set to beat the Eagles in the Smith Center Wednesday night. Set scores were 13-25, 19-25, 25-20, 26-24, 20-18.
“I was just thinking we have to finish,” junior middle blocker Chidima Osuchukwu said.
“This has been our problem in the season that we don’t finish, so we have to prove to ourselves and we have to prove to everybody that we can finish these games.”
The win pulled GW to an even .500 in games decided in a fifth set, a problem all season. The team’s overall record is 16-7.
Of course, to climb out of the hole, GW had to dig it in the first place. The Colonials made eight attack errors and had only seven kills, for a -.029 attack percentage in the first set. The offense was marginally better in the second, but a string of attack errors allowed American to pull away at the end of the set and take a 2-0 lead going into the third.
“At the beginning of the game I think we went very timid and when we go timid I think it’s a lot of errors because we try to place things so precisely,” senior setter Jordan Timmer said. “But at the end we started just hitting. We were going balls to the wall like, ‘we’re just going to hit the crap out of this ball’ and I think we found kills that way.”
Sophomore outside hitter Aaliya Davidson finished with a career-high 17 kills, second on the team only to Osuchukwu’s 19 which helped her surpass the 1,000 kill mark in her career.
It was also a momentous night for senior libero Maddy Doyle, who had a career-high 30 digs to keep GW’s defense steady from the backline all night, while the blocking game got warmed up.
GW finished the night with 13 total blocks but had just one through the first two sets.
“I would say that as the game went on we knew their tendencies, we could pick up on them more and we were just in better spots,” Osuchukwu said.
The Colonials finished the game hitting .194 to American’s .212, but as the fifth set climbed through the 15-point mark and beyond the statistics faded into the drama of the game.
Staring-down and roaring and grinning – there are enough faces made during a volleyball match to fill an Andy Warhol exhibit – each point became a battle of its own.
“The thing that I was thinking is just don’t get rattled,” head coach Amanda Ault said. “They’d take a point and tie it up or they’d go ahead a point and we can’t let that phase us. You know, we’ve just got to stay and keep focusing on what we can do and being in charge and I think they did a good job of that.”
American had match point in the fifth, ahead 14-13, but Osuchukwu struck a kill with such force that it rolled a would-be defender over on her back trying to dig it. At 15-all, Timmer struck a kill at an angle that forced it down sideways across the net. By 18-all the group assembled in the Smith Center was on its feet.
Two attack errors from American later, it was over.
The Colonials resume conference play on Friday against Rhode Island. Tipoff is set for 7 p.m. from the Smith Center.
