by Sean Begin
It hasn’t been the smoothest season for the women’s volleyball team, facing season ending injuries and forced into a new offensive system they headed into the final weekend of regular season play, holding their postseason fate in their own hands.
“Only one game separates four schools from one spot, so all four schools are still in it,” said head coach Linda Sagnelli Sunday after the team’s 3-0 loss to two-time defending champions LIU-Brooklyn. “We’re in the driver’s seat, in the sense if we win on Saturday and we win on Sunday, we’re in.”
Coming into the weekend, Central (9-15, 5-7 NEC) was tied with Bryant for the fourth and final seed in the upcoming Northeast Conference tournament, with Fairleigh Dickinson and Sacred Heart right on their heels.
But an FDU loss to Sacred Heart over the weekend has given Bryant and the Blue Devils a one game cushion over both teams heading into the final weekend of play after both teams split their weekend series against the Brooklyn schools.
On Sunday, Central was swept in three sets by LIU after Bryant had battled the Blackbirds to five sets on Saturday, doubling LIU’s total sets lost in NEC play to just four.
And while both teams beat St. Francis Brooklyn over the weekend, on Sunday Bryant swept the Terriers who pushed Central to five sets on Saturday. Central dropped the first set of that game 25-14 to the Terriers.
“I didn’t think we had any rhythm and things seemed to come difficult to us in the first set,” said Sagnelli. “And then we looked at the stats and Makenna [Lommori] was hitting for a minus and we thought, you know, let’s just get her back into what she knows best.”
A loss Saturday against St. Francis Brooklyn wouldn’t have knocked the Blue Devils out of the tournament but it would have meant a much more difficult road getting there. So Sagnelli made a change and switched her offense.
Putting Lommori back into her familiar role of setter in the 5-1 offense, Sagnelli abandoned the 6-2 she had been using since junior Heather Trueman and sophomore Cassidy Stankowski both went down with season ending knee injuries.
It worked in Sagnelli’s favor that Lommori has been running that offense her entire playing career and that her team knows it so well from running it last semester, so even though they had only practiced it a little before the weekend it came back naturally.
“She’s very comfortable and doesn’t need a whole lot of work to go into what she knows how to do best,” said Sagnelli of Lommori. “So we switched into that and she got her rhythm back, she made very few errors and it just cleaned up our game.”
With Central running what they know best, they were able to hold off the Terriers for a 25-21 second set victory before cruising in the third set 25-9. Central dropped a close fourth set 25-22 after St. Francis had a couple balls fall their way. But the Blue Devils cruised again the fifth set, easily winning 15-6 to keep them firmly in control of their tournament future.
Central now heads into the weekend for road games against Sacred Heart and FDU, who will both be playing Bryant as well. Should Central win both games, they would be the fourth seed in the tourney regardless of what Bryant does.
“We’ve got to take care of business first on Saturday, we can’t even think about Sunday,” said Sagnelli. “And then if we’re fortunate enough to win on Saturday and Sunday presents itself then we’ve got to go after it again.”