Sometimes David doesn't slay Goliath.
The volleyball team learned another hard lesson Wednesday night at Durham's Riverside High School as the No. 4 Stanford Cardinal (6-2) swept by the Blue Devils 15-9, 15-2, 15-5. It was the fifth loss to a ranked opponent this season for Duke (3-5), which still has a non-conference match against No. 3 Long Beach State on the horizon this weekend in Chicago.
"If you play a team like Stanford, when the game is over you have to realize that they are a great team," Duke coach Linda Grensing said. "Right now, Stanford is a better team than us. What matters is how we use that to prepare for the Atlantic Coast Conference season and that we become ACC champions. We're not going to face what we faced tonight in the ACC."
What Duke faced was an intimidating front line of All-American outside hitters Kristin Folkl and Kerri Walsh, last year's NCAA Final Four MVP, and All-American setter Lisa Sharpley. Folkl dominated the net all night, recording 21 kills and registering a gaudy .559 hitting percentage for the match. On several occasions, she tattooed the ball hard enough to stun most of the 1,100 fans into silence.
"Kristin Folkl is a great player," Grensing said. "When she goes up, she's going to have balls where she has big kills. I think what's important is how you respond to the balls that come after that big kill. There were a lot of balls that she hit that were just undiggable balls-it doesn't matter if you're [No. 1] Penn State or Duke."
As a team, the defending NCAA champion Cardinal registered a .455 hitting percentage on the night while the Blue Devils managed a mere .217. And the low percentage wasn't due to an inordinate number of unforced errors on Duke's part-Stanford blockers managed to reject 16 Blue Devil attacks.
"As a setter, at the very end of the game I had Folkl on one side and Walsh on the other," senior setter Kristen Campbell said. "And those are two people you don't ever want to set in front of. Where are we going to see a wall like that in the ACC? I've certainly never encountered anything like that."
Duke held its own in the match's first game. After falling behind 4-0, the Blue Devils fought their way to an 8-8 tie before taking a 9-8 lead on a solo block by junior Megan Irvine. Stanford called a timeout and regrouped, however, and took the next seven points to close out the game.
"Duke had some pretty good success with their left-side hitters in the first game and we had to bear down and play well in order to beat them," Stanford coach Don Shaw said.
Senior Jenny Stadler connected for six of her eight kills in the first game, while Irvine added five of her own and sophomore Dominique Philipp finished off an impressive five of eight attack chances. The Blue Devils also recorded all seven of their team blocks in the first game, surpassing Stanford's five.
The second game saw the Cardinal finish off nine of their 15 attacks for kills, with no unforced errors. Duke, meanwhile, hit an abysmal -.080 as a team.
"I think we saw in the first game that we could match them ball for ball, and I think in game two that we tried to step that level up," Grensing said. "As soon as you try and play harder and go beyond a certain performance level, it basically kind of puts you at a detriment in terms of what your skills are going to be able to do."
The Blue Devils showed some fire to start the third game, grabbing a 2-0 lead. They kept trying to claw their way back as the game progressed, but Stanford slammed the door with three of its starters taking a breather on the bench.
Despite worries that playing away from Cameron Indoor Stadium while the floor is being replaced might take away from Duke's home-court advantage, the sizable crowd that attended Wednesday night's game proved to be ample justification for the move. Most of the 1,000-plus in attendance were Riverside students, their parents and other Durham-area residents-spectators who don't normally make their way to Cameron for home volleyball matches.
"What I'm excited about is that volleyball is being promoted in the community and that it affords some of the young kids who were here tonight the opportunity to see some of the best players in the country," Grensing said. "All sorts of good things came out of having the game here at Riverside."
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