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­A week after jeopardizing its playoff standing with a pair of losses, the Harvard men’s volleyball team responded in an emphatic fashion with a 3-1 victory over George Mason (11-12, 4-5 EIVA) at the Malkin Athletic Center.

Powered by a defense that recorded 38 digs, the Crimson (12-11, 6-5 EIVA) held the Patriots to a .106 kill percentage and clinched a spot in the four-team postseason alongside Penn State, Princeton, and George Mason.

“We really played well across the board,” co-captain Caleb Zimmick said. “We shut them down with our blocking and defense, and then our serving was probably as good as it’s been all year as well.”

Zimmick, who leads all EIVA players with 1.17 rejections per set, notched six block assists. Meanwhile, freshman setter Marko Kostich, junior outside hitter Branden Clemens, and sophomore outside hitter Alec Schlossman combined for 27 digs, one more than all the Patriots together.

Yet George Mason found cracks in the defensive wall throughout the second set, when the Patriots tallied eight kills on 19 total attacks. Midway through the frame, George Mason used a 6-0 run to take control. Harvard lost five of these six points because of attacking errors, and the Patriots rolled to a 25-18 set win.

“You just want to start over and start fresh.” Zimmick said. “There wasn’t anything that we fundamentally did wrong. It just happened to be that we had a couple of our errors come at the same time.”

As soon as the game ended, however, so did George Mason’s offensive success. The Crimson held the Patriots to a .030 killing percentage the rest of the way while posting a .288 mark of its own.

In the fourth set, this margin was particularly obvious, with George Mason totaling nine errors compared to eight kills.

“It was knowing exactly what they had in their arsenal,” Clemens said. “We knew that if we got off to a great start containing them offensively, then we could probably handle their overall team.”

The score reflected the imbalance, and the Crimson won six consecutive points to build a 7-4 advantage. The margin only grew from there. Harvard put together two additional runs and sealed the overall victory with a 25-15 set win.

By contrast, in the opening frame, the Patriots stayed neck-in-neck with the Crimson through a 17-all deadlock. Then Harvard took over—or, more precisely, Clemens took over.

With four kills, Clemens fueled an 8-1 run that swung the set from a close contest to a 25-18 blowout.
On the night, his kill percentage stood at .262, adversely affected by the mistake-laden second game. Co-captain D.J. White led the hosts with 13, and Clemens accumulated 11.

Clemens’s kills in particular came at opportune moments throughout the contest. Not only did he help close out the first frame, but he also notched a pair of finishes in the last four points of the third, which the Crimson took, 25-19.

“You make one good play, and that can carry over into the next one,” Zimmick said. “The good plays that you make, those need to stay in your mind.”

Much like the starting set, the third frame stayed close—in this case up to 14-apiece—until a Harvard run ended the stalemate. With a 7-2 stretch, the hosts gained command before Clemens’ finishes ended the period.

While this weekend’s conference play determined which teams will compete in the playoff, the order remains in flux with a contest against Sacred Heart for the Crimson remaining.

“This week we kind of reminded ourselves of our game plan and worked on the things that we needed to clean up,” Clemens said. “We did a really good job of putting those two things together to get a really important win.”

—Staff writer Sam Danello can be reached at sdanello@college.harvard.edu.