Final Stats

INDIANAPOLIS – Kendall Kritenbrink tallied 26 kills on 47 attacks while Sydney Dimke added 15 kills on 29 attacks as South Dakota volleyball advanced to the Summit League Tournament semifinals with a 25-23, 25-23, 21-25, 25-19 win over Fort Wayne on Friday night in The Jungle.

The win advances the Coyotes (19-11) to a meeting with tournament host IUPUI on Saturday at 6 p.m. CT. The Coyotes and Jaguars split their regular season matches, with USD winning in Indianapolis 3-2 on Oct. 3 and IUPUI topping the Yotes 3-2 in The Den last Sunday.

Kritenbrink finished with a hitting percentage of .426 in Friday's match while Dimke hit at a .345 clip. Both tallied double-doubles as Kritenbrink finished with 12 digs and Dimke tallied 10 digs. Brittany Jessen added 49 assists, five kills and five digs, while Audrey Reeg led USD defensively with 14 digs.

It was a complete team effort and I'm very proud of how the girls stepped up, South Dakota head coach Leanne Williamson said. Kendall came up big and several other players stepped up in key moments as well. We knew going in it was going to be a battle and it turned out to be just that.

The match pitted two of the nation's top attackers against each other. Fort Wayne's Emily Spencer, who was named the league's Player of the Year on Thursday, came into the match as the career kills leader among active D-I players with 2,087, while Kritenbrink was fourth on the list with 1,888. Spencer tallied 19 kills on the night.

Outside of Spencer, the Mastodons (13-20) received 18 kills from Somer Johnson and 14 kills from Sarah Heckman. Madison Spence had 51 assists and added five total blocks to help Fort Wayne to a 11.5-4 advantage in that stat.

Kritenbrink tallied 14 kills and no errors on 22 attacks over the first two sets. She finished the first set with nine kills while Dimke and Reeg both added five digs. South Dakota never trailed in the first set and led by as many as six points.

Dimke was the leading scorer in the second set with six kills on eight attacks. USD won that set despite being out-killed 17-15.

Fort Wayne responded by taking set three behind five kills from Heckman. The Dons defense held USD to 11 kills and tallied 5.5 blocks in the set. Offensively, they had 15 kills and a hitting percentage of .294 while USD hit at a .083 clip.

Kritenbrink tallied eight of USD's 16 kills in the final set while Dimke added five more. South Dakota finished by scoring 12 of the last 18 points in the match. The two teams combined for only 16 digs in the set, with USD recording nine of those.

There were only 12 lead changes in the match, with six of those coming in the final set.

Coach Williamson and the Coyotes will now shift their attention to the Jaguars, who had a first round bye as the second seed in the tournament.

We expect to be pushed, said Williamson. They're going to key in on some of our players, but the best thing is we know who they are and they know who we are. That's what makes the conference tournament so interesting. We've had two other opportunities to prepare for them and learn from what went well and what didn't.

It's going to a great matchup. We look good against each other on paper and playing in their gym is going to be a fun environment.

The other semifinal will feature North Dakota State against Denver. That match will be played before USD-IUPUI at 3:30 p.m. CT. NDSU topped Oral Roberts 3-1 on Friday in the first match of the tournament. Both matches will be streamed live on the volleyball championship page at thesummitleague.org.

The semifinal winners will play each other for the league championship at 3 p.m. CT on Sunday.