On a weekend most will remember for football, Duke volleyball’s new quarterback shined.
The Blue Devils started off ACC play with two home games, winning both against the northern duo of Boston College and Syracuse on Friday and Sunday, respectively.
“I’m happy that we were able to get them at home,” head coach Jolene Nagel said of this weekend’s win. “Each match in the ACC is going to be definitely really challenging, and the fact that we're at home, we’ve got to use that to our advantage.”
This weekend was graduate student Grace Penn’s coming out party with her new team after the former Eagle shared the setting duties with Nikki Quinn during nonconference play. Penn seemingly claimed the starting job for herself, tallying a whopping 97 assists over the course of the weekend, including 45 against her former teammates.
“It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, honestly,” Penn said, “I spent four years of my life putting my heart and soul into that program and [it was hard] to play [against] those girls and those people that I love so deeply to this day.”
Of course, after getting 45 of her 97 assists against Boston College, she got the other 52 against Syracuse, setting a new single-game career high. Penn’s success wasn’t in a vacuum either; the Blue Devils’ offense stood out all afternoon, hitting at a .302 mark.
“I don't get an assist without someone going up and killing the ball, so all credit to my teammates and all credit to the pass, because if we weren't passing like we did, that wouldn't have happened,” Penn said.
The Manhattan Beach, Calif., native herself also provided big kills, especially a pair of set-overs that hit the ground in the heart of the Syracuse defense, punctuated by smirks to her teammates in the huddle. When she wasn’t landing kills, Penn found Kerry Keefe often. The standout junior got used to exploiting holes in the Orange’s defense Sunday, landing 21 kills, her second-highest tally of the season.
Despite the win, Sunday wasn’t perfect for Nagel’s team. The Blue Devils (6-7, 2-0 in the ACC) weren’t able to find consistency at the service line, notching only two aces and 13 errors. Duke will definitely need to patch those up in order to have future success.
“I don't think we got in as great of a rhythm when we kept stopping ourselves with those errors.” Nagel said.
Another imperfection was the second set. After a strong first set, hitting .531, Duke’s offense nosedived down to a .128 hitting percentage. Losing a set in such fashion could have stuck in Nagel’s team’s minds and messed with its confidence, but it bounced back quickly in the third set.
Down 5-3 in the third, Duke launched a barrage on Syracuse, but the Orange didn’t let the ball find the ground. Eventually, they popped up a free ball to Duke’s Rylie Kadel, and the middle blocker did what she’s done all season, burying the ball and causing the crowd to erupt. The Blue Devils built on this momentum, carrying it into a dominant 14-7 run, and eventually taking the set 25-21. The fourth set was Duke’s most decisive, taking care of business 25-17 to win the match.
It seems like the Durham side is pretty good at coming back. It went down two sets to one against Boston College Friday, but won the final two with a similar gritty resurgence.
“I think the team worked really hard to get that one.” Nagel said of Friday’s comeback, “They just stayed in it, and they could have given up multiple times.”
This team will have to maintain that grit that brought it to 2-0 in order to have a successful season, with a tough task ahead in the rest of the ACC slate.
Nagel knows what it takes to succeed in the ACC, having won it four times. Keefe is the only current player to have earned all-conference honors after being named to the All-ACC second team last season. Along with being a star on the court, Keefe is a leader off of it; one of the team’s captains.
“There's still a really long road ahead, the ACC is basically the best league in the country. It'll be a battle, but it feels good to get off to a strong start,” Keefe said. “I think that we have a big stick-together mentality … we’re trying to stay united through it, keeping our heads up, because it's not always going to be easy.”
Next up for Duke is a rivalry set against North Carolina. The Tar Heels come to Durham Wednesday for a 6:30 p.m. game, then the Blue Devils head to Chapel Hill Friday for a 7 p.m. faceoff.
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