Hawks display competitive edge in total whitewashing of Bulldogs

QUINCY — Seven points into Wednesday night’s crucial Great Lakes Valley Conference match and facing little resistance from Truman State, the Quincy University women’s volleyball team could have shifted into cruise control.

It would have been the worst thing imaginable.

The Hawks want to build momentum for the looming postseason conference tournament, not glide into it. The only way to do that was to bury the Bulldogs in the manner in which they did at Pepsi Arena.

Quincy won its seventh straight home match and improved to 9-2 in its last 11 matches overall with a 25-8, 25-12, 25-13 whitewashing.

“We’ve finally found that competitive edge,” junior outside hitter Mattie Norris said. “We haven’t been to show that a lot this season. Even though we might have wanted to act like we had it, we haven’t shown it. The past few matches we’ve really brought the competitor out in each of us as an entire team.

“That also comes from us becoming tired of letting ourselves get beat. We can’t just go through the motions. We wanted to get the job done and seal the deal.”

The goal is to seal a spot in the GLVC Tournament.

With one regular-season match remaining at 2 p.m. Saturday against Lindenwood at home, the Hawks (16-12, 10-7 GLVC) sit in seventh place in the league standings. The top eight teams qualify for the postseason tournament.

“It’s important that we’re firing on all cylinders and really competing at the highest level we can,” Norris said. 

That means staying aggressive at all times.

“You have to keep in mind that you have to keep pushing,” junior defensive specialist Kailey Owlsey said. “You can’t settle in. You can never get complacent. That’s something our team did really well tonight. No matter how far up we were, we just continued to play our absolute best.”

Truman State could do nothing to combat that.

After a kill by Alyssa Grimm to start the first set, the Hawks rattled off the next six points on Makayla Knoblauch’s serve, including back-to-back aces to punctuate the run. A six-point run on Emily Rehagen’s serve gave the Hawks a 14-1 lead.

“We understand if we don’t start out playing well, things aren’t going to go well for us,” said Knoblauch, who had 11 assists and 10 digs in the first set alone and finished with 33 assists and 14 digs. “It was really important for us to come out strong and play well the entire game.

“We took care of the details that needed taken care of.”

Specifically, that meant putting the Bulldogs on their heels with an aggressive serve. The Hawks finished with 13 aces and limited the Bulldogs to a .059 attack percentage largely due to the struggles of receiving the serve and making a pass.

“We made it a point coming into the game to be really aggressive on our serves,” said Owsley, who had three consecutive aces to close out the second set. “We knew they were a pretty weak serve receive team, so if we stayed in control with our serving, we’d have the upperhand.”

Norris led the Hawks with 11 kills and a .579 hitting percentage, while Emily Rehagen had 10 kills as the Hawks hit .385 as a team.

“We’ve shown what we want to be, what we want to become and what we want to continue to become,” Norris said.