Outside hitter Jill Greenfield led a relentless St. Thomas volleyball team to a 3-1 victory over St. Ben’s Wednesday night at Shoenecker Arena to stay undefeated in conference play.

Despite losing the first set, St. Thomas, with the help of Greenfield’s 17 kills, was able to close the game out by winning three consecutive sets 25-16, 25-19 and 25-20.

“This win is big because they are such great competitors, and we know it’s going to be a great game every time we play them,” Greenfield said. “The energy that we came with was so important, and it shows that we have a lot of fight in us.”

After losing the first set 25-22, coach Thanh Pham made the necessary adjustments.

“I just told the team that they needed to relax and play hard,” Pham said. “Don’t worry who we’re playing and just play. Once we made that adjustment, it was a different match for us.”

Middle blocker Kelly Foley finished second on the team in kills with 12. Foley said that after a disappointing first set, Pham told the team to keep fighting.

“He said they are not going to give anything to us so we have to go out there and work for it,” Foley said. “We came out a little slow and were waiting for good things to happen instead of making good things happen.”

Greenfield said the key to winning the game was confidence and playing together as a team.

“Fighting for every point. They pushed us; it was a fun match,” Greenfield said.

Setter Kayla Walton and setter Maddie Reese led the team with 25 and 23 assists respectively, while defensive specialist Whitney Abrahamson gave a solid defensive performance with 24 digs. With the win, St. Thomas improved to 15-4 overall and 5-0 in the MIAC.

“We need to worry about our side of the net; worry about what we can control,” Pham said. “We have big hitters everywhere, and if we are consistent, we will be tough to stop.”

With arguably the biggest weekend of the year coming up, St. Thomas is looking to stay hot.

“We can’t get too far ahead of ourselves,” Foley said. “We have some big teams coming up this weekend so we can’t worry about all of them at once. We need to take it one match at a time.”

St. Thomas will attempt to continue its stretch of dominance Friday as they take on Juniata College (Pa.) and Elmhurst College (Ill.) at the Elmhurst Invitational.

Andrew Frentz can be reached at fren2218@stthomas.edu.