FLUSHING, N.Y. – The Queens College volleyball team fell in heartbreaking fashion Tuesday night at Fitzgerald Gymnasium, as the Knights dropped a five-set East Coast Conference match to visiting C.W. Post (25-19, 17-25, 20-25, 25-19, 17-15).
Senior middle blocker Jovana Pavlovic (Belgrade, Serbia) led the way once again for the host Knights (2-12, 0-6 ECC), as she led all players with 25 kills and a .327 hitting percentage, while adding two service aces and three blocks (one solo). Pavlovic (15 digs) joined junior Suzanne Byrne (Richmond, B.C.; 10 kills, 14 digs) and sophomore Ceren Kilic (Istanbul, Turkey; nine kills, 25 assists, 12 digs) with double-doubles for Queens – which outhit the Pioneers (8-11, 2-4) by a .170-.138 margin and scored 71 points to CWP's 60.
Jordan Schroer (13 kills, 12 digs), Makamae Namahoe (12 kills, match-best 20 digs) and Shayla Hixson (11 kills, 17 digs) all posted double-doubles in victory for C.W. Post.
With the score tied at 13 apiece in the first set, CWP embarked on a 6-2 run to take control of the match early on.
From there, Queens battled back and took the next two sets for a 2-1 advantage. A 9-3 spurt early in set two gave the hosts an 11-9 edge behind three kills from Kilic. Meanwhile, a 7-3 string with a pair of kills from Pavlovic in the third set pushed the Knights' edge to an insurmountable 23-14 count.
The Pioneers turned an 8-7 deficit into a 17-8 advantage (three kills by Schroer) in the fourth set, setting the stage for the fifth and deciding set.
Pavlovic put down a kill and set up an assisted block with freshman Heather Gessner (Mineola, N.Y.) to give QC a 3-1 edge in the final set, before the Pioneers knotted things up at 3-all off a pair of errors. The teams tied each other up every two points until the 9-9 mark, where QC senior Stephanie Schroeder (Lynbrook, N.Y.) registered back-to-back kills to give Queens an 11-9 edge. After C.W. Post took advantage of another pair of errors to knot the set at 11-all, the teams continued to tie things up at the 12-, 13- and 14-all marks. Namahoe and Pavlovic traded kills in that order to push the score to 15-all, before an assisted block by Stephanie Schwarz and Namahoe was followed by a match-ending kill by Schroer to finish the contest.
Head coach Leanna Taylor's Knights are back in ECC action Thursday night, when they travel to the University of Bridgeport (Conn.) for a 7 p.m. first serve.
