BALTIMORE, MD – There are any number of sports idioms that can be applied to the recent play of Johns Hopkins senior outside hitter
Ivy Swafford. For the sake of this piece, let's just say she's on a heater.
The 22
nd-ranked Johns Hopkins volleyball team capped its two-match run through the Hopkins Invitational on Saturday morning by sweeping past St. John Fisher by scores of 25-17, 25-15 and 25-17. Much of the damage in the victory came, to coin another idiom, at the hot hand of Swafford.
If you're tracking the Blue Jays, that's three straight wins that have now bumped the season record to 6-5.
If you're tracking Swafford, her 18 kills in the win give her 67 in her last three matches after she punched up 24 against St. Thomas (TX) last Saturday and a career-best 25 in Friday night's five-set thriller against Scranton.
If you're tracking Blue Jay volleyball history, the 67 kills are the most by a Johns Hopkins player in a three-match span in at least 10 years.
If you haven't been tracking Blue Jay volleyball history, let me tell you, there have been some pretty good players don the Hopkins Blue and Black in the last decade.
On Saturday, the Blue Jays grabbed the 25-17 set-one victory by using an early 10-1 run to turn a 3-2 deficit into a 12-4 lead that was never seriously threatened. An ace by Swafford jump-started the run and she then served up seven straight points to give the Jays a 10-3 lead. The Cardinals would pull within six late in the set (23-17), but
Josephine Kinlan found the floor on a strike from the outside and
Annika Anderson's ace iced the set for the Jays.
The 10-point win in the second set didn't have the same early surge as the first, but the Blue Jays methodically pulled away as the set unfolded. Swafford wrapped a pair of early kills around a
Sami Hockers ace to turn a 2-1 deficit into a 4-2 lead and the score was never tied again. The lead would stay steady between four and six points until a Kinlan strike with the Blue Jays up 19-14 ignited a 6-1 set-ending spurt that included four more Swafford kills.
The Blue Jays bookended the final set with runs of 8-1 and 11-3 to complete the sweep. The opening 8-1 surge was answered by a prolonged Cardinal run that saw them pull even at 14 on a Lydia Fraser kill. Fraser's kill was one of six St. John Fisher collected during the spree, which also included a pair of Blue Jay service errors and two Cardinal aces, including one by Fraser.
Hopkins would take the lead for good on Swafford's 16
th kill of the day; the kill sprung the Blue Jays on the 10-1 match-ending run that was capped by a pair of
Bethany Sherwood kills.
Swafford rang up her 18 kills on just 32 swings with only two hitting errors (.500) and added 10 digs in the win. Anderson (13 assists) and Hockers (12) fed the hot hand throughout the win and
Nicole Tuszynski's 12 digs led a 48-dig effort for the Blue Jays that played a big role in holding the Cardinals to a .056 hitting effort (22-17-90).
Kaylene Noble collected a team-high six kills for the Cardinals and Ana Gutman added four. Fraser had a team-high 10 digs and Zofia Koegh collected 15 assists for St. John Fisher.
The three-match winning streak for the Blue Jays comes after a five-match stretch against teams currently ranked in the top 19 in the nation.
After fighting their way through that brutal stretch, the Blue Jays appear to have found their second wind (😉).
An annual tradition, an All-Tournament Team was selected by the head coaches of the four participating programs at the conclusion of the event. Earning the distinction were Cammi Quirk (Scranton), Lydia Fraser (St. John Fisher), Logan Burge (Stevenson) and
Celine Ebert and
Ivy Swafford (Johns Hopkins).
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Gallery: (9-26-2026) Volleyball vs. St. John Fisher
