Loyola volleyball enters 2024 SSAC Championship as No. 4 seed

The competition begins with two matches on Thursday

11/12/2024 11:11:00 AM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The 2024 Southern States Athletic Conference (SSAC) Volleyball Championship begins on Thursday in Montgomery, and the Loyola Wolf Pack (10-17, 7-6 SSAC) will be the fourth seed in the tournament.

The top eight teams in the conference are split into two pools, with pool play taking place on November 14-15. The top two teams from each pool will advance to Friday's semifinals, which are scheduled for 5:30 p.m.

Loyola will be the second seed in Pool A, which also includes top overall seed Mobile, fifth seed Point, and eighth seed Tennessee Southern. Since Mobile won the regular season title and one of the conference's two automatic bids, the other seven teams in the tournament will be competing for the second automatic bid, which would be awarded with a tournament championship.

The Wolf Pack will begin the tournament with a match against UT Southern on Thursday at 11:30, followed by Mobile at 4:30. The No. 4 seed Pack will close out pool play against No. 5 seed Point at 1:30 Friday.

After a turbulent start to the season in which the team won just one of its first 14 games, the Pack turned the season around in the second half, with an eight-match winning streak helping the team win nine of its final 13. Two of those wins were sweeps against fellow Pool A teams Point and UT Southern. The team also played tough against top seeds Mobile and William Carey in the final weeks, taking both to five sets in road matches.

Loyola's leading attacker this year has been Amaya Bazemore, a graduate student playing in her third year in New Orleans who has won SSAC Attacker of the Week twice this season. In 2024, Bazemore has the most kills among middle blockers in the conference (283) on a .337 hitting percentage, a career-best 2.9 kills per set, and she leads the conference in total blocks (108).

Preslie Boswell has also put up a career best in kills per set this year, averaging 2.2 kills on a career-high .207 hitting percentage. Freshman Clarissa Dupree has been second on the team in kills for most of the season, totaling 191 kills at an average of two kills per set. Juliana Pacini, who played in 12 matches due to injury, is also over two kills per set with 82 total kills on the year.

Ellie Connor has led the team's setters with 468 total assists, 4.9 per set, while playing all but two sets for the Pack this year. Gabriella Masiello (244 assists, 4.1 per set) and Belén Puche Laguna (209 assists, 4.3 per set) have also spent a significant amount of time at the setter position this season.

Defensively, Simone Moreau leads the squad with 457 digs, the second-most in the conference this season, at a career-high average of 4.7 digs per set. Kala Emanuelli, who has started 15 matches this year, has averaged 1.7 digs per set for 167 total digs. Connor and Juliet Petruzelli each have averaged about 1.6 digs per set this year, and both have eclipsed 30 service aces this season, Connor with 33 and Petruzelli with 31.

Loyola is looking to make back-to-back trips to the NAIA National Championship tournament with a conference tournament win.

Subscribe to Pack Tracks, a Loyola Athletics Newsletter, for all of the latest information >> https://loyolawolfpack.com/subscribe.aspx. You can also keep up with the Pack by following Wolf Pack Athletics on Facebook at Facebook.com/LoyolaWolfPack, Twitter and Instagram @LoyolaWolfPack, and by checking out our website at LoyolaWolfPack.com.

2024 SSAC Volleyball Championship Schedule

Pool A: #1 Mobile, #4 Loyola, #5 Point, #8 UT Southern
Pool B: #2 Blue Mountain, #3 William Carey, #6 Faulkner, #7 Life

Day 3 | Nov. 16
2:00 p.m. | Championship

Print Friendly Version