Squad has not dropped a set this season

University of East London women’s volleyball team swept past Imperial College London’s 1st team at SportsDock on Wednesday, 25-12, 25-13, 25-16.

After UEL scored the first two points, Imperial won three in a row to take the lead but East London responded with four straight, before ICL then drew level at six all.

The hosts then began to pull away, scoring three on the serve of captain and outside hitter Alex Vajdova to take a 14-8 lead.

They extended that to lead by six before scoring the final seven points of the set to take the first 25-12.

In the second, the East Londoners once again took the lead, 1-0 but UEL hit out a kill attempt and were whistled for an illegal rotation, allowing ICU to go up 2-1.

The home side then regained the lead after two aces from universal Beth Gunter.

But the assistant referee called UEL for another illegal rotation at 5-5, although the head referee overturned the decision.

UEL took advantage of the call and scored six straight points, whilst the visitors were penalized for an illegal rotation during this stretch.

The Imperial College team tried to stay with UEL after that, but two aces from Luca Toth at 13-8 gave East London a solid seven-point advantage.

And another ace from Gunter finished off the second set before the third set brought more of the same from both teams.

Imperial started with an ace to take the lead, and then UEL went up 2-1 with a strong kill from Vajdova.

At 2-2, the assistant referee once again gave ICL a point after an illegal rotation by UEL, but the team was not happy with the call.

They put that behind them though to quickly draw level, but ICU took the lead back, 4-3.

After East London knotted the game at four, Carrie Beck made a quick tip over the net to win the point giving UEL the lead for good.

East London utilized several tip-over kills in the third set, mainly from Beck, before they eventually won 25-16 to seal another victory.

UEL have yet to drop a set this season, and Morawski does not believe that anyone can challenge them in their quest for promotion to the BUCS Premier League.

“It’s just a shame that we can’t really compete against the teams from the BUCS Premier League yet,” Morawski said.

“But we’re looking for promotion, so hopefully next year will be much more challenging.

“We’ve played every single team in our league now, and we were quite confident throughout all those games, all the sets, never out of control.”

Despite Morawski’s confidence he does believe UEL need to improve how they start, he added: “We can definitely work on the way we start.

“We tend to get into the game very slowly, make a lot of unforced errors. So far it’s without any consequences.

“But the time will come, especially in the Volleyball England student cup, when we will play better teams and they can take advantage of that and if we don’t start strong, we can always find ourselves chasing the game.”

UEL will play the University of Surrey at the SportsDock next Wednesday at 2 p.m.