NCAA Women
December 19, 2024
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — No DeBeer?
No problem.
Not when you have Payton Peterson.
There is nothing like Louisville and Pittsburgh in NCAA volleyball and the Cardinals wrote another chapter in their incredible recent history with a 21-25, 25-23, 29-27, 25-17 victory Thursday night in the NCAA Division I Volleyball Championship national semifinals that saw an unsung freshman star emerge.
The Cardinals now have a chance to do what no team has ever done, win every round at home when they play in Sunday’s national-title match.
Pittsburgh, rather, made its own history by losing in four consecutive national semifinals.
Anna DeBeer, the Louisville native, the leader whose gritty play has defined the program during her five-year career, went down with a right-leg injury with her team up 2-0 in the fourth set.
And that’s when Peterson, a 5-10 freshman whose mother, Bobbi, is the coach at Northern Iowa, put herself into the lore of the game.
She not only had back-to-back aces that gave Louisville a 9-3 lead, but had four digs and two kills with no errors in four errorless attacks. And the last one put the punctuation point on the match when…
