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The Orange led 9-5 in the second set when the ball found senior setter Lauren Woodford. Virginia’s defense expected her to set the ball to a teammate, but Woodford saw an opportunity to catch the defense off guard, instead opting to smack the ball over the net for the kill.

The point sparked a run of five consecutive points for the Orange, who produced six different runs of three or more consecutive points during the second set, which they ultimately won 25-11 — Syracuse’s largest margin of victory in a single set all season.

After SU took the first two sets, the Cavaliers battled back by winning the third frame and taking a late lead into the fourth set. But the Orange (11-13, 7-7 Atlantic Coast) prevailed, defeating Virginia (11-14, 3-11 ACC), 3-1, at home on Sunday afternoon. The Orange were without sophomore setter Riley Hoffman, prompting Woodford to play the entire match. She took advantage of the extra playing time by producing 25 assists, her most since SU’s win over Wake Forest on Sept. 30. She did so with the Orange running a 5-1 offense that they haven’t utilized yet this season.

“It was kind of an unexpected change so we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare,” Woodford said. “I’ve run a 5-1 in club when I was younger and on this team up until this year, but this is a new group and a new coaching staff so we’d never run this offense before.”

At the net, Syracuse came away with nine blocks — with Raina Hughes and Viktoriia Lokhmanchuk coming away with five and four, respectively — while Virginia only managed one. Lokhmanchuk led the Orange with 13 kills, meanwhile Polina Shemanova produced a season-low of seven. But Shemanova also set a career-high in aces with six — an area the Orange specifically set out to exploit as Virginia has struggled to receive serves throughout the season, head coach Bakeer Ganesharatnam said.

The Orange ended the match with an advantage of 12 aces to three, an area that allowed Syracuse to go on a multitude of runs, especially during the second set, in which the Orange had seven of their 12 aces.

“We served the ball really, really well in that set,” Ganesharatnam said. “We had major serving runs that really allowed us to score really quick points and establish those runs. If you play a set to 25 and you have big runs of four or five points, you’re almost there.”

Following Woodford’s kill, she came away with a block to give Syracuse the next point to make the score 10-5. That was followed by a UVA ball handling error and attack error, sandwiching a Lokhmanchuk service ace. Virginia responded with four straight points, but a service error gave momentum back to the Orange, who followed it up with a Bre Walp ace and a kill apiece by Shemanova and Hughes.

But after the second set, the match’s momentum shifted toward the Cavaliers. They took the third set by a score of 25-20, and after Syracuse jumped out to a 7-1 lead in the fourth frame, Virginia clawed its way back to eventually take a 20-17 lead, forcing the Orange to call a timeout.

After cutting the deficit to 22-20, a kill by Shemanova and consecutive attack errors by Virginia gave Syracuse the lead back at 23-22, the second of which came courtesy of a block by Hughes and Naomi Franco. Shemanova then assisted a Franco kill, and a bad set by the Cavaliers’ Madison Morey concluded SU’s 8-2 run out of the timeout and ended the match.

Even as the Cavaliers seemingly found their comfort zone and began to take over the match, Syracuse stayed true to its original game plan to put away the match before a fifth set was necessary.

“We thought we had a good game plan — it clearly worked, looking at the first two sets,” Ganesharatnam said. “For us, it was (about) putting more effort in. We were fatigued (and) couldn’t execute to the level we usually want to, but we wanted to pull through and put everything we (had) into those remaining points in order to get that set.”

Published on November 6, 2022 at 5:34 pm

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