BREVARD, N.C. - The Brevard College volleyball team played arguably its most complete match of the year on Friday night against the nation's eighth-ranked team, but visiting Wingate was too strong for the upstart Tornados in the Bulldogs' 50th consecutive conference win.
With the match tied at one set apiece, Brevard found itself facing a 23-19 deficit after a Tornados' attack error. Playing with confidence after overcoming 22-14 and 22-15 deficits against Newberry on Tuesday night, Brevard halved the lead on one of Whitney DeMoss's 10 kills and a Wingate attack error, forcing Wingate to call a timeout as the momentum began to shift in Brevard's favor. Two more DeMoss kills tied the set at 23, then the teams traded points until another DeMoss kill, her fifth in a nine-point span, gave Brevard a 26-25 advantage.
As Brevard stepped back to serve, the frenzied crowd made so much noise that the Tornados' server couldn't hear whether the referee had blown his whistle. Her serve was ruled to have come before the ready-for-play signal, charging Brevard with a service error that tied the match and gave Wingate's Cory McGowan the serve. The Bulldogs scored the next two points on a block by Susie Murach and Alison Cooke and a Lexi Potter kill, ending a back-and-forth set that saw 16 ties, five lead changes, and a dominant performance by DeMoss as she hit .600 with seven kills in the set.
Wingate built an early 10-5 lead in the fourth set and was able to cruise to a ten-point victory to seal the match as Brevard was unable to rebound from the anguishing third-set defeat.
The Tornados, however, had proven their mettle earlier in the match by bouncing back for a second-set victory. Wingate had earned a 25-17 win in the first set as the Bulldogs snuffed out a brief 3-0 Brevard run to close the gap to two points at 16-14 by scoring six straight points of their own, putting the set out of reach. But Brevard appeared to be the superior team in the second set, never trailing while holding the nation's fourth-leading team in attack percentage to an .059 mark and committing just three errors of their own.
After Wingate had deadlocked the score at 16, just the second tie of the set, Brevard gained a three-point advantage on back-to-back-to-back Bulldogs' attack errors, forcing a Wingate timeout. Fatima Gharachorloo, who tied DeMoss for the team lead with 10 kills, notched two terminations on the next three plays to up Brevard's run to 5-1, and the Tornados would allow Wingate to get no closer than three points in their 25-21 victory.
Gharachorloo moved into third place on Brevard's all-time kills list with her eighth kill of the match, which evened the score at 17 in the third set. She has now totaled 642 kills in her career, needing 28 to move into second place and 103 to pass Brooke Seaman for the all-time lead.
Libero Aleksandra Vrvilo also moved into third place in program history, using her match-high 18 digs to pass Sidney Yeomans on the career digs list. Her 794 digs leave her 76 shy of taking over second place from Lindsey Rogers and trails Rebecca Schoonover's 1,350 digs for the all-time lead.
For the Bulldogs, Potter and Abby Saehler paced an offense held 62 percentage points below its attack percentage season average with 12 and 11 kills, respectively. Cooke had a match-high 41 assists. For Brevard, Erin Barr totaled 35 assists of her own, while Rachel Ruble added two assisted blocks and a pair of solo stuffs to her seven kills and the team's lone service ace of the match.
The Tornados will return to action Saturday morning with an 11:00 a.m. match against SAC foe Coker.
Featured image courtesy of Neil Hayes. Click here to view more photos by Neil.
