PENSACOLA, Fla. – The University of West Florida battled back from an opening set loss to win three straight and remained unbeaten in Gulf South Conference play with a 3-1 (25-22, 21-25, 25-19, 25-17) victory over visiting Lee University inside the UWF Field House on Friday evening.
The Argonauts improved to 9-0 in conference play and 16-3 overall. The loss ended a five-match winning streak for the Lady Flames. They dropped to 6-4, 10-9. The tough road trip continues on Saturday afternoon when Lee moves on up to Valdosta State University and challenges the Blazers in a 1 p.m. GSC affair.
Lee moved on top 19-17 in the opening set and forced the first of two timeouts by the Argos before claiming the 25-22 battle. In the second and third sets, the story was just about the same, the Lady Flames fell behind in the middle part of the sets and could never quite catch up. However, they did force the West Florida coaching staff into a pair of timeouts in the second set before going down 21-25. In the third set, Lee trailed 16-12 and fought back to cut the margin to 20-18 and forced an Argo TO. The talented UWF squad pulled away and won the set 25-19.
Esthefany Rabit turned in a solid all-around performance in the loss. She finished with six kills, four service aces, one solo block and eight assists for a total of nine plays at the net. Sophia Lippert and Jasmine Terry had 10 kills apiece. Payton Danley turned in seven kills and seven blocking assists. Lee had 24 blocking assists to go along with one solo block. The Lady Flames actually out-battled the Argos in that department 24-16.
Berra Soyler dished off 14 assists and Sydney Sharpe had 12 for the Lady Flames. Izzy Denton was the dig leader with 13 and Sara Palumbo added 10. Lee had 57 digs while UWF came away with 56.
The Argos won the battle in the kill department having 55 slams to 42 for the Lady Flames. Kumara Flanagain tallied 12 kills while Aniston Cochran totaled 10 kills but had a solid .375 attack percentage. Gabi Moulton set her teammates up with 40 big assists. Madalyn Mire came up with 24 digs. It was not a good serving night for the Argos. They had six aces but 13 service errors. On the other hand, Lee totaled five aces and just seven errors.
Coach Christa Fabre's thoughts:
"We started out strong and shut down a couple of their hitters. Like a top team will, West Florida responded, made some changes and exposed weaknesses of ours. We allowed their offense to score in the same way repeatedly and have to learn to take away another team's tendencies. I do believe our team will grow from this match and should have confidence to see that we can compete with the best."
