ATHENS, Ga. — The first one is in the books.
The Santa Clara University volleyball team moved to 1-0 in 2022 Friday with a season-opening victory, a 3-0 (25-14, 25-20, 25-19) non-conference sweep over Chattanooga in game one of the Classic City Clash hosted by the University of Georgia at Stegeman Coliseum.
"It was fun," said Santa Clara head coach Erin Lindsey. "It's nice to go into the first match of your season and have all the things go the way you want them to. We've talked a lot going into this weekend as a team about staying in our system and communicating through what we're seeing, and I think that's what allowed us to have success today."
The Broncos (1-0) hit .465 as a team Friday, their highest in a match since Sept. 3 of last year when they hit .524 versus Nevada. They hit .500 in both the second and third sets with only three total errors. The Santa Clara defense held Chattanooga (0-1) to .148 and .091 hitting, respectively, in the first two sets, and limited them to .165 for the match.
Preseason all-West Coast Conference honoree Julia Sangiacomo led Santa Clara with 15 kills. Oren Abutbul hit .478 with 13 kills. Nani Spaar didn't commit an error while logging eight kills in nine attempts for an astounding .889 hitting percentage.
"I congratulated the team on their first win," said Lindsey. "We have very specific team goals on what we want to achieve and how we're going to compete at the top of the WCC, and a big part of that is winning a lot of our non-conference games. Everyone's excited, but I think it's more validation of the things we've focused on in preseason."
Nive Tuileta powered the offense with 38 assists and narrowly missed a double-double with eight digs. Kat Georgiadis led the Broncos' stingy defense with a match-high 17 kills. Santa Clara dug 45 of Chattanooga's 91 attack attempts and blocked two others, amounting to denying more than half of the Mocs' tries at scoring.
Santa Clara is set to play two matches on Saturday to conclude play at the Classic City Clash. The day opens with Troy at 10 a.m. PDT, then wraps with an evening meeting against host Georgia at 4:30 p.m. PDT. Both matches will have live stats, and the match against Georgia will be streamed live on SEC Network+. All live coverage links can be found on SantaClaraBroncos.com.
"The teams tomorrow are both stronger," said Lindsey. "Troy returns a lot and went to postseason (in 2021), so they're going to have some confident returning student-athletes. And then Georgia is just going to be physical. They're going to be a physical SEC team. Those present some different challenges for us."
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