Volleyball ends skid with two victories

BOSTON -- The Penn volleyball team turned the tide this weekend by beating Harvard and Dartmouth 3-0 with ferocious defense, ending a five-match losing streak.

On Saturday, the Red and Blue beat the Crimson in three games, 30-24, 30-23 and 30-26.

With many long, exciting rallies, the Quakers (8-12, 5-4 Ivy) lunged, jumped, blocked and even elbowed to make saves and prevent the Crimson (3-17, 0-10) from scoring.

"When the girls make impossible saves and have these long rallies, we call them gameday rallies," Penn coach Kerry Carr said. "Every time they have a gameday rally, they get to play a game instead of running as their warm up. We have gameday rallies because I want to encourage and reward this strong defense and passing. Today, we had three."

Penn posted 87 digs, led by libero Elizabeth Hurst and outside hitter Cara Thomason, who tallied 23 and 17, respectively.

"Liz Hurst played amazing defense today," Carr said. "She inspires the rest of the team to play better defense."

At Dartmouth (10-10, 3-7) on Friday, Hurst again led the Quakers with 25 digs as Penn won, 3-0. In the last two games, Penn only sneaked by the Big Green with twin 30-28 scores.

Players and coaches attributed this weekend's wins to a greater effort during practice.

"We practiced really well this week," sophomore Anna Shlimak said. "We take stats during our practice games, and all of them were amazing. Everyone put in 110 percent. The result was better performance during games."

And even though Penn has already lost to four of its next five opponents, Carr is confident.

"We have to redeem ourselves," she said. "We should win the next five matches even though they are teams we've lost to before. We just need to be mentally prepared."

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