WHITING, Ind. — The Goshen College women's volleyball team tripled its season win total on Saturday, sweeping six sets across two matches to top Calumet College of St. Joseph and Bluefield State College in a tri-match at CCSJ's Rittenmeyer Center.
Haylee Pennington fired off 18 winners for the day and Naomi Willis added 48 assists. Goshen held off Bluefield State 32-30, 25-16, 25-13 before blanking the host Crimson Wave 26-24, 25-19, 25-12.
The back-to-back wins on the same day were Goshen's first since Aug. 24, 2019, when the team topped Michigan-Dearborn and Mount Marty. Since the Maple Leafs lost the second set of that UMD match, however, they did not win six consecutive sets that day: the last six-set winning streak posted by GC was October 17-20, 2017, against Mount Vernon Nazarene and Great Lakes Christian.
The last Maple Leaf team to post two sweeps on the same day was the 2014 edition, which blanked both IU Northwest and Purdue Calumet on Sept. 6 of that year in Ruth Gunden Gymnasium.
While GC (3-8) won four of its six sets by six or more points, the first set of the day did not come easily as the 32-30 score marked the team's longest set of the season. The Maple Leafs used a 5-2 run to go up 12-7 in that set and added another four-point spurt to make it 19-12. Bluefield State answered with 11 of the next 13 rallies and served for the set four times before 28-all. GC closed out on its fourth set point after kills from Madison Coles, Pennington and Sadie Brenneman.
The teams split the first 16 points of the second set and were tied 11-11 before Christina Towne decided she had had enough and served out a 7-point run to break open the stanza. An Emma Dippon kill and a Naomi Willis ace capped a 14-5 run to end that set.
The Big Blue opened a 10-7 lead in the fourth set before a seismic momentum shift: Pennington and Lynch combined for five consecutive kills to start a 14-1 Goshen run that made it 21-11. After a service error, Amy Baca registered a pair of blocks in the final four rallies as the team posted a sweep for the first time in more than two years.
Forty minutes later, the second match got underway and followed a similar pattern of a tight first set turning into a Maple Leaf cruise. Goshen finished with more than twice as many kills as its host and racked up 8 aces to Calumet's 3.
The Crimson Wave (1-8) opened 5-1 and 9-5 leads only to watch them get erased thanks to four straight points from Brenneman and Coles. Goshen took its first lead of the match at 12-11 before getting two Pennington winners to lead 16-13. Calumet stayed alive and earned two set points at 24-22, but Goshen finished the set with two kills and two attack errors for the 26-24 comeback win.
The Leafs carried that momentum into the second set, opening a 7-2 lead before giving it all away and falling behind 10-9. Pennington, Emily Lynch and Gwyn Bellamy hooked up on a 7-1 run to put the ball back in Goshen's court, however, and four players had hands in the last five points on the way to a two-set lead.
GC trailed briefly at 1-0 in the third set but broke it open with a 7-1 run to go up 11-5. The Crimson Wave managed four points on their own serve in the set and finished with fewer kills than errors.
Calumet picked up the win in the day's other match, snapping a 43-match losing streak with a 25-23, 27-25, 23-25, 25-23 win over Bluefield State.
With two invitationals and a tri-match in the rear-view mirror among the season's first 11 matches, Goshen will now play exclusively Crossroads League contests for the next 27 days. In that span, the Maple Leafs will meet every CL school at least once. The team hosts Bethel University on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the year's first installment of the U.S. Highway 20 Cup rivalry.
