HOUSTON - The league's two nationally-ranked programs met in the Conference USA Volleyball Championship on Sunday afternoon at Tudor Fieldhouse and the match lived up to its hype. No. 19 WKU edged No. 21 Rice in five sets to claim its fifth C-USA crown in six years and an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Championship Central
Box Score
Bracket
2019 Overall Stats
Championship Stats
One week after they hoisted their fifth C-USA Regular Season Championship, the Lady Toppers (31-1) secured the team's 12
th NCAA appearance in program history and first since 2017 after being upset in last year's quarterfinals. WKU, led by C-USA Coach of the Year
Travis Hudson, enters the tournament as the country's first squad to reach the 30-win plateau and its leader in wins, win percentage and sweeps. Rice (26-3) awaits its postseason fate and looks to compete in the NCAA Championship for the fifth time in school history. The Owls fell short of a league title, but hold the program's third-most wins in a single season under its winningest head coach
Genny Volpe.
These two programs had it out in the C-USA Championship title match for the third time since 2014, each of the meetings coming down to five sets. Top-seeded WKU defeated Rice, a six seed, when the Owls hosted the tournament in 2016. The Lady Toppers also clipped Rice 3-2 in 2014. Another five-set duel between the teams took place most recently in the regular season, when Rice fell victim to WKU at Tudor Fieldhouse on Nov. 10.
WKU was consistently balanced on both sides of the ball. Five Toppers finished with double-figure kills as the team hit .306 and four players earned double-digit digs. WKU also posted 10 blocks in the effort. C-USA Player of the Year
Lauren Matthews was crowned Tournament MVP after polishing off her weekend a 21-kill outing on a .526 hitting clip. Junior
Nadia Dieudonne lifted 61 assists and paired the double-double with 15 digs.
Junior
Nicole Lennon led the Owls with 25 kills and 13 digs to complete her third double-double of the event. Senior
Lee Ann Cunningham added 18 digs and senior
Grace Morgan led the team with three blocks, while also chipping in 11 kills on a team-best .391 hitting mark.
Just when the Lady Toppers looked like they had it sealed in four, Rice came storming back to force a fifth. Morgan grabbed a kill out of an Owl timeout and Dieudonne reached her third of the day to send WKU up 24-21.
Ellie Bichelmeyer added a kill and a combo block by the freshman and sophomore
Anota Adekunle pulled Rice within one. Sophomore
Carly Graham and Bichelmeyer brought Rice to set-point with a couple of kills before WKU used a timeout. Lennon tacked on one last kill to keep Rice alive with the fourth, 26-24.
Lennon's ace made it a 4-4 set in the final round, but a later 5-1 spurt on a trio of Owl attack errors gave WKU some breathing room, 9-5 after the teams made the turn. The Lady Toppers committed a serving error, but it didn't do much damage as another two points in a row completed the win, 15-9.
Four points in a row, two on a pair of aces from
Adria Martinez, had Rice and its home crowd amped up to start the day's action. The opening run came to a halt when WKU responded with a 5-0 stretch of its own until Lennon struck her first kill to tie it up 5-5. A 7-2 run for the Lady Toppers later gave the team a slight 15-13 advantage with Matthews posting a block at the media timeout. WKU maintained its pace and took the set 25-17 with the lift of a Dieudonne ace. Both teams tallied 11 kills, though WKU had the edge with a .357 hitting clip to Rice's .028, and six team blocks.
WKU called its first timeout of the tournament in the second set with Rice building a 10-5 advantage on a .500 hitting mark and a 4-0 rally fueled by a couple of errors. The Owls extended their lead to seven and upheld the advantage, 22-15 with back-to-back swings by Morgan and a successfully reversed challenge call on an Adekunle kill. The Toppers grabbed three-consecutive points that sent Rice into a late timeout, but answered with three in a row out of the break to win it 25-18 and even the match.
A tightly-contested third frame saw a lead no larger than two. A kill from Adekunle gave Rice the set-point, but WKU took it back with a pair of kills by
Sophia Cerino and Matthews. Lennon came through with two big swings to earn the Owls set-point two more times before WKU would silence Rice with three-straight points and back-to-back kills by Matthews to stamp it 29-27.
C-USA All-Tournament Team
Nicole Lennon, Rice
Anota Adekunle, Rice
Grace Morgan, Rice
Lauren Matthews, WKU (MVP)
Nadia Dieudonne, WKU
Sophia Cerino, WKU
Paige Briggs, WKU