(Photo: Sammy Nute/WCSN)
TEMPE – If the only scene you saw from No. 14 Arizona State’s victory over Memphis was freshman libero Piper Rama doing the worm and busting out a gymnastics move that would make you think she was trying out for the gym devils during a coaches challenge in the third set, you would probably think that the Sun Devils victory was as easy as they come.
While the third and final set of the night might’ve been along those lines, Arizona State faced some challenges on the journey to get there and win their penultimate non-conference game.
The Sun Devils (9-1) got the 3-0 sweep in the end, but it wasn’t as efficient as head coach JJ Van Niel would’ve liked, and it wasn’t until midway through the second set that the team started to fire on all cylinders and separate itself from the opposing Memphis (6-6) squad.
“I think we started getting a little more serving pressure on them,” Van Niel said. “You know there were some things that I felt like we maybe needed to execute a little better at, but I think probably halfway through the match we started getting them out of the system a little bit more.”
In the second set Arizona State committed eight errors, which was an improvement over the 10 in the first set, but those errors allowed the Tigers to keep it close. However, a 10-5 scoring run to end the second set truly separated Arizona State from Memphis. Six different Sun Devils got kills during the run and they limited the errors to just one during that span to win the set 25-19. It was the same score as the first set but the ending of set two carried over into a dominant third for ASU.
“We talked in between the break (between the second and third sets) just about sort of some of the expectations we have for ourselves as servers and the standard we set and I didn’t feel like we were really hitting those tonight and we talked about that between the break,” Van Niel said. “I thought we did a little better job in that last set, kind of putting pressure on.”
The pressure was indeed on early in the third set. Arizona State jumped out to a four-point lead which turned into a 12-3 run before the Tigers could start to get points more consistently. It was during that run that Van Niel successfully challenged an incorrect touch call to give the Sun Devils a 10-3 lead and it was during that challenge that Piper Rama and the Arizona State bench were getting the crowd in a frenzy.
Despite still needing 16 points (15 after the challenge was successful) to win the match the atmosphere in Desert Financial Arena created by the bench and the crowd made it seem like the match was already decided.
“That bench is the greatest bench I’ve ever been a part of,” graduate setter Argentina Ung said. “They are amazing. They just keep up. They engage with the fans, they engage with us, we just love every single one of them.”
Ung was massively important in the win. She had 37 assists with a good number of them being finished off by senior outside hitter Geli Cyr.
It was five kills by Cyr that helped lead Arizona State to win the third set and seal the match. Cyr had eight kills over the other two sets for a total of 13 and she did it on both a .650 hit and kill percentage for a career night.
Six of her kills came in the first set and four of those came early on. Memphis lagged around five points back from Arizona State in the first set which meant Cyr’s early kills provided the buffer the Sun Devils would need to win the first set and set Cyr herself up for a big night.
The Sun Devils have now won the first two games of the Webb-Burbridge Classic in sweep fashion to put their record at 10-1 with just one more non-conference game to go, and the team is looking to finish non-conference play strong before heading into its Big-12 schedule.
“Just builds up our confidence,” Ung said when asked what winning tomorrow would mean to her. “I feel like (we’ve) been doing great so far. We know TCU is a good team, as well as Baylor, but we’re not looking ahead of any other team so we’re just focused on Montana (State) tomorrow.”
