ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Nazareth women's volleyball fell 3-0 in a hard-fought battle to St. John Fisher in the championship round of the Empire 8 tournament. Nazareth finishes its season with a 17-14 overall record and a 10-1 conference record.
 
The first set was extremely close, but at a score of 14-14, Fisher started pulling away with four straight points. The birds then exchanged points back and forth. Down 24-19, the Golden Flyers tried to squeeze back to a tie game, but they were one point away from being successful when the Cardinals scored the set point. Nazareth dropped the set 25-23.
 
The second set was also very exciting to begin, with nine tie scores and seven lead changes before the halfway point of the set. However, once again Fisher strung together a run at an optimal time to begin pulling ahead of Nazareth with a score of 15-11. The Golden Flyers could not recover from this deficit and dropped the set 25-16.
 
The Cardinals led the entire third set, aside from three tie scores. At a score of 9-9, Fisher put together two back to back five point runs, that were only broken up by a kill from Tessa Grover, to give themselves a late lead of 19-10. At a score of 24-17, the Golden Flyers once again tried to squeeze back into the game with a three point run, but a Fisher kill from the tournament MVP ended the set and the game.
 
Grover led the scoring and the defense with nine kills and 11 digs, while also tallying 10 assists. Leah Fusilli added seven kills, while freshman Alana Lucey had five. Ella Kules led the team in assists with 13. Jenna Mattison and Zoe Tylipakis had six and five digs respectively.