Colyer and Harms produce quality performanes but Pride drop pair of matches to start William Penn Tournament
OSKALOOSA, Iowa - Competing in their second tournament in as many weekends to start the 2025 season, the Clarke University women's volleyball team was unable to pull out a match win in their first two matches of the William Penn Tournament on Friday in a 3-0 loss to Waldorf University and a 3-1 loss to close out the day against Mount Marty University.
Half of CU's set losses went to extra points as the Warriors earned their 3-0 win by set scores of 25-16, 28-26, and 25-20 where the Pride would win the opening set of their match against the Lancers 25-20 before dropping the second 29-27, the third 25-15, and the fourth 26-24.
The day was highlighted, despite the losses, by a pair of standout performances by the setter/right side combination of Kortney Harms and Keely Colyer, who essentially played a game of "anything you can do, I can do better" against Mount Marty as the juniors both produced triple-doubles with their kill, assist, and dig totals.
Colyer had the advantage in kills with a career-high 20 then also produced 22 assists, her most assists in a match since her freshman season of 2023 and just four behind her career-high from Aug. 26, 2023 in another four-set match then finishing with 10 digs to round out her first career triple-double.
Harms produced her third career triple-double after recording two last season with 12 kills, 16 assists, and a match-high tying 19 digs, just one shy of her career-high for digs in a match as the match against Mount Marty marked the first time the Pride went to both Harms and Colyer to set since the season-opener against IU-Northwest a week ago.
Where the Lancers made up for their lack of strong individual performances they made up for defensively at the net with a total of 12 blocks, nine combined blocks and three solo blocks compared to just seven for CU as that along with the 45 combined attacking and service errors from Clarke gave MMU 13 more points than the Lancers gave the Pride on their errors.
In the day's opener against Waldorf, Clarke was also led by Colyer in kills as she produced nine kills on 21 attempts for a .286 with Kaelyn Minich and Kelsey NeCollins combining for 11 kills in the middle with NeCollins being in on all three of the Pride's block assists in the match.
Pride libero Jayden Knox produced double digit digs in each match with 13 in the opener and 14 in the finale to continue her streak of 10 or more digs in five-straight matches now with only one of the seven matches seeing the junior from Waukon, Iowa having single digit digs.
Clarke women's volleyball will play two more matches on Saturday in Oskaloosa to wrap up their tournament weekend when they face Briar Cliff University at 1:00 p.m. CT followed by the tournament finale against Dordt University at 3:00 p.m. CT.