CHAPEL HILL—Volleyball may be played in sets, but for the Blue Devils, Friday's match was a matter of two halves. They hung around in the first one, but lost their grip near the midway point, resulting in another loss against a tough but beatable opponent.
North Carolina handed Duke its second straight loss Friday night in straight sets (26-24, 25-19, 25-15) at Carmichael Arena, dropping the Blue Devils to below the .500 mark for the first time since 2012. The Tar Heels out-blocked Duke 11.5-1, outhit the Blue Devils .386 to .214 and never trailed in any set by more than a point.
“I thought we did a really good job today of being neck and neck and fighting for every point,” junior middle blocker Jordan Tucker said. “I think in the third set, we reverted back a little bit, got a little bit quiet and didn’t have that killer mentality…. Points for the other team just seemed to string together, and it kind of just slips away.”
Duke’s best opportunity of the match came at the end of a nail-biting first set. The Tar Heels (5-7, 2-1 in the ACC) had extended their lead, let Duke back into it and then regained control. Trailing 22-19, senior outside hitter Emily Sklar—who finished the match with a game-high 15 kills—finished a long rally with a kill down the left sideline to bring the Blue Devils (6-7, 1-2) within two. Duke won five of the next six points, capitalizing off of multiple Tar Heel errors.
Once more, the Blue Devils had momentum, and a chance to steal the opening stanza. But with Duke serving for the set leading 24-23, senior Paige Neuenfeldt put down three straight kills to hand North Carolina a 26-24 win and 1-0 advantage. Neuenfeldt—the first-ever Tar Heel to earn three AVCA Honorable Mention All-America honors—finished with an efficient 11 kills on 13 attempts.
“That’s the difference,” Duke head coach Jolene Nagel said. “You miss that serve, or somebody misses a blocking assignment, or somebody misses a dig that they can easily get, and I feel like some of those things happened.”
The Blue Devils did not go down quietly, though. They fought the second set to a 15-14 deficit, leading the Tar Heels in kill, assists and digs and battling neck-and-neck with North Carolina.
But Duke won just 20 of the next 55 points. Errors and outstanding North Carolina blocking allowed the Tar Heels to close out the match in a heartbeat. Duke committed 20 attacking errors during the match compared to the Tar Heels’ six, and though Duke handled the North Carolina front line well during the first half of the match, it was stumped during the latter stages.
“They did a great job of closing blocks and getting two blockers up at all times—they had it together,” Tucker said. “They also did a very good job of knowing where we were going a little bit, so they were able to see the tendencies.”
Duke entered Friday's match ranked ninth nationally in kills per set, but the Tar Heel front line flummoxed the Blue Devils for much of the night, holding Nagel's squad to a .214 hitting percentage. Sklar led the way for Duke with 15 kills, and junior Alyse Whitaker turned in eight kills and a team-high .467 kill percentage.
On the other side of the net, the Tar Heels bumped their .283 kill percentage in the first set to .542 in the second and .419 in the third, which Nagel attributed in part to losing track of North Carolina middle hitters Neuenfeldt and Victoria McPherson. The Tar Heel duo combined for 17 kills and just three attack errors.
“We really didn’t want their middles to be able to run,” Nagel said. “I thought early on in the match, we did a better job than toward the end of the match of taking those middles out so they couldn’t run on serve-receive."
Duke senior outside hitter Breanna Atkinson, who has missed five matches this season due to a lingering injury, played only one set Friday and posted a -.500 kill rate with two errors on her four attempts.
Needing to right the ship, Duke will face N.C. State Sunday at 1 p.m. in Raleigh.
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