GOSHEN, Ind. — For the first two sets Friday evening, the rankings may well have been reversed: the 20th-ranked Goshen College Maple Leafs racked up 21 kills against 4 errors and had the second-ranked Campbellsville Tigers on the ropes to the tune of a 25-21, 25-15 lead.
Unfortunately for Goshen, college volleyball matches are played to the best three of five sets, and despite 19 kills from Alexander Rabadzhiev and 6 blocks from Ian Fox, the Maple Leafs lost the next three sets 25-21, 25-19, 15-12 to fall in each team's season opener.
The Tigers got a match-high 20 kills from Jason Camacho and 19 digs from John Montalvo. Campbellsville posted double-digit kills in each set, hitting .333 over the last three stanzas for the comeback win. The visitors finished with 66 winners to Goshen's 42, although the Maple Leafs racked up 12 blocks to the Tigers' 5.
Lucas Sauder put down a career-high 10 kills and walled off 4 blocks, his best total since 2019, for the Maple Leafs. GC also got 32 assists, 9 digs and 6 kills out of setter Michael Wahl. Brayton Yoder led the team with 13 digs and Elias Baer had 12 to go with 4 blocks of his own.
In a nod to each team playing its first match of the season, the errors began to pile up: Campbellsville made 61 and Goshen 40. Seven Tigers committed multiple service errors and the only player on either team with multiple aces was CU's Noah Henkel.
"We blocked well, our defense played very aggressively and our offense was very good," said head coach Jim Daugherty. "We played very tentatively in the third set, trying not to lose instead of trying to win. That gave them a chance to gain momentum. We need to be aggressive until the match is over and play more consistently rather than letting up."
Owing to COVID-19 and the break between semesters, the match was played without GC's usual raucous crowd, although a live-stream audience of more than 400 saw no shortage of energy from the teams or public-address announcer Madi Simmons.
Campbellsville opened a 9-4 lead in the first set before a service error and kills from three different Maple Leafs started a 9-4 run the other way. Goshen tied the score at 13 on a Wahl ace and at 14 on a service error, then gave up three straight points before winning three in a row to make it 17-all.
A block from Baer and Fox tied things again at 18 before Wahl's kill put the Leafs in front for the first time. GC finished the set on an 8-3 run, including two kills from Rabadzhiev off the serve of Nick Yutzy.
Goshen's momentum carried into the second set, where the Tigers made seven errors in the first 10 points to help their hosts to a 10-4 lead. Another late spurt, this one four points long on Andy Bennett's serve, culminated in two Sauder kills and two Tiger errors to set up 10 set points. The team converted on the second chance to go up two sets to none.
While the Maple Leafs came back from a four-point deficit twice in the third set, the momentum did not carry over from the second stanza; this was evident when Campbellsville won the first four points.
GC worked its way back to tie things at five consecutive opportunities from 6 to 10 before the Tigers went up 15-11. This time the hosts won four straight points to get back to 15-all, but that was again followed by a 5-1 run to put Campbellsville in front. The teams split the last dozen points but it was not enough to finish off the match as CU won 25-21.
In the fourth set, Goshen finished with more hitting errors than kills: after starting the set with a Sauder kill and a 4-2 lead, GC lost six points in a row and never recovered. That sent the match to the fifth set, where Campbellsville again jumped in front 3-0 and used 8 kills to pull ahead 10-6.
Goshen had one more run in it, winning five out of six points as Sauder had two kills and a block to tie the score at 11, but the visitors won four of the next five rallies to escape with the win.
Goshen returns to the court Thursday at Trinity Christian College in a battle of teams receiving votes in the NAIA coaches poll. Since Trinity Christian is in Illinois and observes Central time, the match begins an hour later than usual at 8 p.m. EST.
