Twenty-Six Kills and Fifty Years: Julia Blyashov and the Long Memory of Stanford Volleyball

There are matches that decide a season and matches that explain one. Stanford’s four-set win at Duke on Friday night was the second kind. In Cameron Indoor Stadium, a gym better known for another sport, No. 15 Stanford took the first two sets, lost the third, and then survived a fourth set that ran to 31-29. At the center of it was Julia Blyashov, who finished with a career-high 26 kills, according to Stanford Athletics’ match report.

The final scores, 26-24, 25-22, 21-25, 31-29, tell you how thin the margins were. The box score tells you who closed them. Blyashov hit .436 for the night, added 18 digs for her team-leading seventh double-double of the season, and put down eight kills in the fourth set alone, the last of them on match point. The win moved Stanford to 13-6 overall and 6-3 in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and kept its all-time record against Duke perfect at 9-0.

A Night of Depth, Not Just Volume

It would be easy to file Friday under a single name, and Blyashov earned the headline. But the more instructive numbers are spread across the roster. Stanford recorded a season-high 69 kills and hit .280 as a team against a Duke side that had two attackers of its own past 20 kills: Ashby Zubchevich with 28 and Nataly Moravec with 22.

Junior middle blocker Lizzy Andrew added 15 kills on .406 hitting with four blocks. Senior outside hitter Ipar Kurt, back in the lineup after missing six matches with an injury, contributed 16 kills, a return that matters as much for November as for October. Sophomore setter Logan Parks ran the offense to a season-best 58 assists, and freshman middle Ella Andrews chipped in eight kills at .400 with four blocks of her own.

Behind them, the back row did the unglamorous work that four-set road wins require. Libero Spencer Etzler had 21 digs, her fourth match this season with 20 or more, while Jordyn Harvey added 13 and Malyssa Cawa a career-high 16. Stanford finished with 80 digs in all. In a fourth set that was tied deep into extra points, that is the difference between a long bus ride and a short one.

A Hot Hand in October

Friday was not a one-off. On Oct. 18, in the annual Pink Match at Maples Pavilion, Blyashov had 21 kills, then matching her career high, with 12 digs and .432 hitting as Stanford came back from a first-set loss to beat NC State 19-25, 25-11, 25-21, 25-19. The Cardinal hit .377 as a team that afternoon and remained unbeaten at home this season. Earlier in the month, The Stanford Daily reported that Blyashov hit .607 with 18 kills against Virginia.

The pattern is worth noting because this has not been a frictionless autumn. Stanford has lost to Texas A&M, Penn State, Arizona State, SMU, Pittsburgh and Louisville, a list that includes some of the sport’s strongest programs. A team picked by the league’s coaches to win the ACC, with five Preseason All-ACC selections in Andrew, Blyashov, Etzler, Harvey and Parks, is now finding its rhythm in the second half of conference play, which is roughly when the people who set NCAA tournament brackets begin paying close attention.

Fifty Years On

The backdrop to all of this is an anniversary. Stanford fielded its first varsity women’s volleyball team in 1976, and on Oct. 16, the night the Cardinal swept Wake Forest 25-22, 25-15, 25-17, the program brought back alumni to mark 50 seasons, honoring the 1976 team alongside the national champions of 1996, 2001 and 2016.

The ledger those alumni built is unusually long. By Stanford Athletics’ count, the program has won nine NCAA championships, more than any other school, along with 23 Final Four appearances, 17 appearances in the title match, 143 NCAA tournament match wins and berths in 44 of the 45 NCAA tournaments held. It has also won 25 conference titles, the most recent a share of its first ACC crown last season, when the Cardinal went 29-5. Kevin Hambly, now in his 10th season as the Montag Family Director of Women’s Volleyball, added the 2018 and 2019 titles to that list, and his teams are 121-14 at Maples, according to the athletic department.

The tradition also extends well past graduation. Kathryn Plummer, a member of the 2016, 2018 and 2019 championship teams and pictured above, won an Olympic silver medal with the United States in Paris in 2024, and the program counts 11 Olympians in its history. In September, Inky Ajanaku, another pillar of the 2016 title team, was inducted into the Stanford Athletics Hall of Fame. A program with that kind of memory tends to judge any individual season against a high bar, and the current team knows it.

What Comes Next

The road trip ends Sunday evening at No. 23 North Carolina, a 5:30 p.m. Pacific start on ESPN. The Tar Heels arrive at 13-4 and 8-1 in the ACC, ahead of Stanford in the standings, though Stanford leads the all-time series 4-1. Then comes a rare doubleheader with Cal: at Haas Pavilion on Oct. 28 and at Maples on Oct. 30.

None of those matches will settle where this team ranks among the 50 that came before it. But a night like Friday in Durham, with a career high from one player, a comeback from another and contributions down the bench, is a fair reminder of how Stanford volleyball has usually gotten there: not on talent alone, but on depth that holds up in a fourth set that refuses to end.

Photo: Kathryn Plummer serves for Stanford at Nebraska, Sept. 18, 2019. HuntingtonPHOTOS / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.