Kennesaw State volleyball splits weekend home matches

By E. Marcel Pourtout, Editor

Kennesaw State volleyball split its two contests this weekend at home.

The Owls (8-9, 1-2) started with a 3-1 (25-21, 25-23, 20-25, 25-23)  win over Northern Kentucky on Friday night.

Kelly Marcinek had a double-double with 16 kills and 11 digs. Cierra Royster finished the match with 14 kills and a .700 hitting percentage.

Kristi Piedimonte collected 48 assists with eight digs and six kills in the win.

Fanise Cannon led the team with 15. Toure Hopkins finished with 14 digs from the libero position and Alex Huber had a career high with seven.

“The fight of this group continues to amaze me,” head coach Keith Schunzel said. “We’ve been really injury prone these last couple of weeks, so it’s been a real up and down week and a half of training. We talked about no matter what’s happened, we’re 1-0 and tonight’s a chance to go to 2-0 in conference, and we finally had a chance to close a team out in the fourth set and we did it. A lot of our players stepped up tonight and it was great.”

Kennesaw State dropped its second match on Saturday to Lipscomb 3-0 (25-22, 25-17, 26-24).

Anaiah Boyer had a team-high 15 digs and eight kills in the loss. Katarina Morton returned as the libero and finished with 14 digs. Piedimonte had 24 assists for the Owls.

“You don’t ever want to be encouraged by a loss, but we just talked about it in the locker room that two of those sets and really two and a half sets until the end of set two was point for point, and we were doing good things and playing well,” Schunzel said. “That’s a good team (Lipscomb). They have a lot of older players that have been through it. It’s a good team that our guys can learn from and realize that the difference between the two of us is not that great.”

Kennesaw State returns to action on Oct. 10 in a home match against Stetson.