The Seton Hall women’s volleyball team fell, 3-2, to the Butler Bulldogs on Friday night after having a 2-0 lead in the match. The Pirates have now lost eight straight games and fall 7-20 for the season. Julia Wilkins led the Pirates with 16 kills on the night and Maggie Cvelbar had a team-high 31 assists.
The Pirates started off the first set with momentum as they took an early 10-3. Later on, the Pirates would continue its offensive rhythm extending the lead to 17-10. The Bulldogs would come back scoring five straight kills, reducing the lead to 17-15. The first set would be a back-to-forth contest until the end until the Pirates would prevail scoring two straight kills to win 25-22.
During the next set, Seton Hall and Butler would exchange points in the early part of the set with both teams tied 10-10 in the middle of the set. The rest of the second set would be close, but the Pirates would finish the set on an 8-4 run to win 25-18.
With the game winning set on the line, the Pirates were looking ready to close out, taking an early 11-6 lead in set three. Butler would not let the set three go down without a fight, however, tying the set at 13-13 with their own 7-2 run. The rest of the set would be another tense battle with both teams trading shots. The Pirates had a perfect opportunity to close the game out with a 24-21 lead, but Butler would score five straight points to extend the game.
In set four, Seton Hall would have its struggles breaking apart the Butler defense, but it would have a 15-11 lead at one point. Again, the Bulldogs refused to lose their confidence as Butler would outscore the Pirates 14-4 to take set four 25-19.
With the match on the line, both teams refused to lose ground with more exchanging of kills in set five. In the end, the Pirates could not regain any rhythm, as Butler would win set five 15-11 and would also take the match 3-2 after trailing 2-0 earlier in the match.
In response to the tough loss, coach Allison Yaeger said she was still proud of the performance even with how the Pirates blew a perfect opportunity for a win in set three.
“I’m very happy with this,” Yaeger said. “We kind of had a rock bottom weekend last week and we can only go up. That Butler team is a very good volleyball team and we made a lot of switches and we worked on that over this last week. I thought the girls just played really good tonight. They fought and competed, and that is something that we really lacked.”
The Pirates will next face Xavier on Saturday Nov.9 at 8:00 p.m. in Walsh Gymnasium.Ryan Beltran can be reached at Ryan.Beltran@student.shu.edu or on Twitter @RyanB591011.
