A grueling final month of the regular season begins this weekend for Duke, which will have to try to start another winning streak on the road.
The Blue Devils will face Boston College Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Power Gym in Chestnut Hill, Mass., before traveling to Syracuse, N.Y., Sunday to play the Orange at 1 p.m. in the Women’s Building. Duke will embark on just its second of four weekend road trips in conference play after a front-loaded home schedule helped the Blue Devils win six games in a row—their longest winning streak in two years—before dropping a four-set match to Georgia Tech Sunday.
“We’re going to have to make sure that we’re giving everything we’ve got because these are two important matches,” Duke head coach Jolene Nagel said. “They’re on the road, and you can just never take anything for granted.”
Impressive defense has propelled the Blue Devils (14-6, 8-2 in the ACC) to the top 5 of the ACC standings through half of the conference season, as Duke is tied for third in the nation in digs per set and senior defensive specialist Sasha Karelov leads the ACC in the same category by a wide margin.
But the Yellow Jackets found holes in that stingy defense Sunday with a solid .236 hitting percentage—the highest of an ACC team against the Blue Devils this season—and two players notching at least 15 kills.
“We weren’t as efficient with our blocking and our defense. Both kind of go hand in hand,” Nagel said. “I don’t think we were that far off. It was just a little bit, but when you’re playing a good opponent, you’ve got to make sure that you’re on point every night out.”
The Eagles (5-15, 0-10) are not as strong offensively as Georgia Tech, with a .176 hitting percentage on the season, and are still searching for their first ACC win. But Boston College has stepped up at home this year, where it has notched all five of its wins and pushed No. 8 North Carolina to five sets.
Junior Sol Calvete leads the Eagles with 164 kills this year, and senior Julia Topor and freshman Jill Strockis also have more than 140 for their team's balanced attack.
“They’re a lot better than what their record might show, and I also think they’re really good at home,” Nagel said. “They have quite a few young players out there on the court playing big roles for them.”
Duke will then fly to Syracuse to try to avenge last season’s four-set loss in Durham, but both of the Orange’s players that notched more than nine kills in that match have graduated. Syracuse (5-15, 4-6) has the worst hitting percentage in the ACC at .162, and its three leaders in kills are all underclassmen, led by freshman outside hitter Mackenzie Weaver with 166.
But the Orange have stayed just one game under .500 in conference play with a strong block game. Syracuse is third in the conference with 2.82 blocks per set—leading the Blue Devils by nearly half a block—and junior Leah Levert has 82 total blocks this season. The Orange have four players that are 6-foot-4, making it difficult to hit past them at the net.
“They’re really big, but we’re going to have to contend with that,” Nagel said. “We’ve worked on some of that this week in practice as well so that maybe we can feel comfortable working with a bigger block.”
At the midway point of the conference season, Duke still has work to do to get in position to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time in two years. Six of Duke’s last 10 games are on the road, and two of the remaining home games are against top-30 RPI teams Florida State and Notre Dame.
The Blue Devils are No. 70 in the RPI rankings and cannot afford a loss against either opponent this weekend—both are worse than No. 200 in the RPI—with the top three teams in the ACC still looming on the schedule down the stretch.
“The NCAA tournament is always a goal of our team, but we have to take care of business one match at a time,” Nagel said. “There’s a lot of volleyball yet to be played.”
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