Alle-Kiski Valley campus clippings: Grubbs sets up pair of wins for Thiel volleyball

By: Michael Love
Thursday, October 3, 2019 | 7:06 PM

With two wins in its past three matches, the Thiel women’s volleyball team hopes to recover from a 1-14 start.

Freeport graduate and sophomore setter Courtney Grubbs is leading that charge for a team with one senior and one junior.

Grubbs helped Thiel score a 3-2 upset of Bethany on Tuesday in a Presidents’ Athletic Conference match. It was Thiel’s first win over Bethany in seven years.

In the fifth game, she set up a kill for a 12-9 lead and delivered the final three points with two service aces and another serve that ended with a Bethany error.

Grubbs finished with 37 assists and 15 digs.

In 18 matches, she had 433 assists (6.77 per game), 25 service aces and 38 kills.

As a freshman, Grubbs played in 33 matches, starting 31. She tallied 1,028 assists (8.64 per game), the third-most assists in a single season in program history.

Cohen seeks title defense

Fox Chapel graduate Lacey Cohen hopes to add more gold to her collegiate resume at this weekend’s Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference tennis championships.

The tournament begins Saturday and runs through Sunday at Bloomsburg.

Cohen, a senior at Slippery Rock, defeated IUP’s Katya Minchenkova in straight sets to claim last year’s title. She became the first player in program history to capture a league single championship.

The top-seeded Cohen was the 2018-19 PSAC West Athlete of the Year and 2016-17 PSAC West Freshman of the Year.

Cohen had 121 career singles and doubles victories through last weekend’s IUP Invitational. This fall, she is 6-2 in singles matches.

Local connection at CCAC

The women’s volleyball team at the Community College of Allegheny County is 7-2 after Tuesday’s 3-0 victory over Beaver County Community College.

A group of local graduates are helping make a difference for the team in Division III of the National Junior College Athletic Association. They are outside hitters Harper Ercole (Riverview) and Marah Williams (Apollo-Ridge), right-side hitters Kristen Karcher (Freeport) and Paige Presutti (Riverview) and defensive specialist Donaeya Robinson (Highlands).

Presutti leads the team in assists and is second in service aces, and Ercole is first in digs, second in kills and third in total points.

CCAC has four matches left in the regular season, starting with Monday’s Western Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference home match against Westmoreland County Community College.

Zolnierczyk wins first

The Robert Morris men’s soccer team is 2-0-1 in its past three games, allowing just one goal, and Springdale graduate Mike Zolnierczyk has helped in the team’s success.

The starting goalkeeper since the beginning of the season, Zolnierczyk picked up his first college victory in a 1-0 Northeast Conference result against Mt. St. Marys on Sept. 27. He made four saves to preserve the clean sheet.

He played in a 1-1 draw against Howard on Sept. 22 and was a part of the Colonials’ 0-0 draw against NEC foe Fairleigh Dickinson last Sunday.

Komaniak tops stat sheet

Riverview graduate Michael Komaniak owns four goals and three assists for the Washington & Jefferson men’s soccer team. Both lead the team through 10 games.

The sophomore midfielder/forward was a factor in both goals — he scored one and assisted on the other — in a 2-2 nonconference draw with Allegheny on Wednesday.

Komaniak opened the scoring against Muskingum on Sept. 25, and W&J (3-6-1) went on to win, 2-1.

Michael Love is a TribLive reporter covering sports in the Alle-Kiski Valley and the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh. A Clearfield native and a graduate of Westminster (Pa.), he joined the Trib in 2002 after spending five years at the Clearfield Progress. He can be reached at mlove@triblive.com.