NEW ORLEANS — Five Xavier University of Louisiana players, including Senior Day honoree Chinedu Echebelem, led the Gold Nuggets to a 25-11, 25-13, 25-16 Gulf Coast Athletic Conference women's volleyball victory against Tougaloo on Saturday.
Xavier (12-4, 8-0) has won 51 consecutive matches against GCAC opponents, 42 in the regular season. Tougaloo is 7-14, 3-6.
Echebelem, an outside hitter from Dallas honored in a ceremony between the second and third sets, hit .316 with nine kills and seven digs. Claudia Haywood hit .619 with 14 kills, and CeCe Williams hit .370 with 12 kills.
Franziska Pirkl had match highs of 39 assists and eight digs for Xavier, and freshman Kayla Jones served a career-best five aces.
Xavier limited Tougaloo's leading attacker, freshman Chassidy Harris, to four kills and a .118 hitting percentage.
Jones served four aces in the first set, three during a 7-0 run which gave Xavier a 22-9 lead. Haywood had three kills during an 8-0 second-set run which gave the Nuggets a 14-7 lead, and Haywood and Williams had two kills apiece during an 11-1 third-set run to give Xavier a 15-7 lead.
Echebelem, the second four-year player in the program's history, raised her career totals to 852 kills and 886 digs.
Xavier hit .316 — its second-highest percentage of the season — and limited Tougaloo to .056. The Nuggets had advantages of 44-19 in kills, 8-1 in aces and 35-31 in digs.
Xavier completed a two-match regular-season sweep of the Lady Bulldogs and leads the series 10-0.
The Gold Nuggets will play six of their next seven on the road, beginning with a 6 p.m. Monday match at GCAC member Talladega. The next home match will start at 7 p.m. on Oct. 30 against SUNO.
NOTES: Haywood is hitting .440 in conference matches this season, .519 against Tougaloo . . . Jones became the fifth XU player to reach 100 digs this season . . . XU walk-on freshmen Simone White and Aliyah Wilson played for the first time this season . . . Since the start of the 2011 season, the Gold Nuggets are 83-27.
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Ed Cassiere, Sports Information Director
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