Todd’s relentless play propels undefeated Orange to sweep of Niagara
The fierce look on Hayley Todd’s face said it all. As the senior outside hitter went up for one of her 12 kills on the night, the look wasn’t as if she wanted to simply beat Niagara. The look was as if she wanted to destroy them.
Just moments earlier, it looked as if Todd and SU’s vaunted offense would be outshined by the Purple Eagles. Niagara, after all, was the team that began the offensive destruction, leaving the Orange in a 7-2 hole to start the match.
‘I think we just weren’t warmed up or ready to go,’ assistant coach Carol LaMarche said. ‘It’s something we need to work on.’
But eventually, the Orange caught up, and Todd’s kill a quarter of the way through the first set gave the Orange a 9-8 lead, ensuring it would not fall behind Niagara for the rest of the set. SU won all three sets in the match on Tuesday to improve to 13-0. And the swing play was Todd’s.
Todd’s play woke the Orange offense up in that first set and showed Niagara who the undefeated team was.
‘The middles were holding their middle blockers, and Laura (Homann) was making good decisions with the ball,’ Todd said. ‘So I pretty much had the whole court to do whatever I wanted, so that made my job really easy.’
Todd was a major factor in the win. At one point in the first set, she recorded kill after kill after kill. When she was finally blocked, you could see the sense of hope on the faces of the Niagara players.
Not that it lasted very long.
The usual offensive culprits of Mindy Stanislovaitis and Noemie Lefebvre assisted Todd in the kills category, with Stanislovaitis recording eight kills and Lefebvre adding six.
Freshman Lindsay McCabe also had a strong night, contributing seven kills in extended action while complementing the established upperclassmen of Todd, Stanislovaitis and Lefebvre.
McCabe recorded a kill in the first set to tie the score at 17 and recorded another key kill in the second match. The latter gave SU a commanding 11-4 lead that would peak at 12-4.
Like Todd, McCabe’s kills in the first set helped offset the team’s slow start to the match.
‘Every team wants to beat us,’ McCabe said. ‘They’re going to come out firing, and maybe harder than you expect. We were thinking we had to regroup and calm down.’
Regroup they did, as the team won the first set 25-20. Todd had hoped, at the start, the Orange would keep Niagara below 20 points. But despite the Purple Eagles reaching 20, the first set the stage for the two wins in the final two sets.
Todd’s first kill in the second set put the Orange up 8-1. But Niagara kept the set close throughout.
‘For every point we were getting, Niagara was getting two,’ LaMarche said. ‘We tried to work on running a different play than what we had been trying, and it worked out eventually.’
Todd and her multiple kills carried SU in what would eventually be a 25-19 win in the second set. Not soon after, the Orange cruised to the sweep in the third.
But even in the third, and after the game, Todd kept that intense demeanor. Her words reflected that demeanor.
‘Every time you play a New York team, you want to crush them,’ Todd said. ‘Any time you play any team, you want to crush them. It doesn’t matter so much who’s on the other side. It matters what we do.’
And although SU didn’t ‘crush’ Niagara, it got the win. And to Todd, that is equally, if not more important than destroying a team.
‘It’s a ‘W’,’ Todd said. ‘Maybe not as clean as we’d like to see, but a ‘W’ is a ‘W’.’
