No. 1-seeded Pittsburgh sweeps WSU out of NCAA volleyball tournament, season still ‘one for the record books’

Pittsburgh seized momentum late in the first set against Washington State and didn’t relinquish it the rest of the way.

It made for a long afternoon for the fourth-seeded Cougars, who exited the NCAA volleyball tournament with a 25-20, 25-13, 25-16 setback Thursday to the top-seeded Panthers in Pittsburgh.

“Tough day today,” Cougars coach Jen Greeny said. “Pitt is a quality team, so congratulations to them. We didn’t have our best day and that happens sometimes, but overall I’m really, really proud of this team and what it has done.”

WSU needed its ‘A’ game against the Panthers, who seemingly took advantage of every Cougar miscue while playing in front of full house at Fitzgerald Field House on Pitt’s campus.

Pitt (28-4) will attempt to make its third consecutive Final Four when it entertains second-seeded Louisville, a five-set winner over No. 3 Creighton, on Saturday.

The Cougars finished 26-8, the most wins in Greeny’s 13 seasons, but they now enter an uncertain offseason with 10 Pac-12 schools leaving for other conferences.

“We’re going to do everything in our power to just keep doing what we do at Washington State volleyball, and that is eight straight NCAA appearances,” Greeny said. “We’re going to coach the same way, we’re going to recruit the same way, even though we’re not sure who we’re playing.

“I think we belong in a Power Five conference, for sure. We don’t have control over that, so we’re going to control what we can control in our program.”

The Cougars came out strongly, but their hopes of an extended tournament run started to fade when their passing struggled, particularly against Pitt servers late in a back-and-forth opening set.

Neither team led by more than two before Pitt won four of five points to go on top 20-16. Then it was WSU’s turn, taking four of the next five points on kills by Katy Ryan, Madga Jehlárová and Iman Isanovic to close within 21-20.

That’s when it began to unravel for WSU. Pitt freshman Torrey Stafford smacked a kill down the line and Cat Flood followed with an ace. That forced Greeny to call timeout, but it didn’t slow the Panthers, who got another Stafford kill and another Flood ace to take the set.

The Panthers raced out to an 8-1 lead in the second set and never looked back.

“Just passing,” Greeny said of what went wrong in the latter stages of the first set. “Our serve and pass kind of broke down in that second set. We let Pitt run off a lot of points and it made that gap in the score pretty wide. Credit to them, they got their block going and played great defense as well.”

Part of that, Greeny said, was due to WSU’s passing, which made the offense “a little more predictable than we typically are.”

Pitt had six aces in the first two sets to WSU’s one. The Cougars hit .272 in the opening set, but finished at just .141 against Pitt, first nationally in that category at .134.

Pitt raced in front 9-2 in the third set. Pia Timmer helped the Cougars close within 13-10 with two kills and two aces, but Pitt pulled away behind Stafford and freshman standout Olivia Babcock.

The 6-foot-5 Babcock had 15 kills, five blocks and four aces. Stafford added 10 kills. Isanovic led WSU with eight kills, and Timmer and Jehlárová both had seven.

“Just one for the record books probably,” said Greeny, reflecting on the season. “A lot of these fifth-year seniors broke tons of records. Pia broke the record today as our all-time aces leader. They wrote their names in a lot of record books.”