Highland’s Logan Bradley goes up to hit the ball in her team’s three-set win over visiting Marion Harding Thursday evening.
Rob Hamilton | Morrow County Sentinel
Just two days after losing their first conference game of the year and playing without injured All-Ohio senior setter Larsen Terrill, the Highland volleyball team rebounded in a big way, beating visiting Marion Harding by scores of 25-8, 25-9 and 25-9.
In the contest, the Highland attack didn’t seem to miss a beat with junior Kendal Kline taking over as the team’s setter. Head coach Rob Terrill noted that Kline does have experience at that position.
“Larsen was out for a couple matches last year and Kendal got to run the show for us,” he said. “She’s not new to that position. This is her first year starting varsity as a DS, but she can slide over to that spot and do a great job. I’m just really proud of the kids. They stepped up like we needed them to.”
The message coming into the Harding contest was simple: Despite losing to Pleasant, the Scots still held the MOAC lead and just needed to take care of business.
“Like I said after that night, we’re still in first place by ourselves, so that didn’t really change anything,” the coach said. “We just needed to come back out tonight and play smooth. We didn’t expect to lose Larsen for a while, but the girls responded tremendously tonight. I thought our girls stayed really focused. I told them I was most proud in the first set that we were scoring points. They weren’t giving us points by errors or anything else. They only had four errors and we scored 21 points and they continued that through set two and set three.”
It didn’t take long in that first set for Highland to earn a commanding lead. With the score tied 2-2, Addison Mullins recorded 12 straight points while serving. The Scots would maintain a double-digit lead until, with the score 21-8, Kline was able to finish the set by serving its final four points.
Highland won by similar margins in the second and third sets. In the second, after giving up the first point, they scored three straight — two from Mullins’ serving — and then went on to get points each of the seven times they had the opportunity to serve the rest of the way.
Mullins had the biggest impact behind the line, also recording a five-point run serving; however, Logan Bradley tallied three points and Kameron Stover, Kline and Mia Stanco all added two points when it was their turn to serve.
Kline got the team off to a fast start in the third set, opening with three straight points. Two from Stover made it an 8-3 game and Stanco added one to boost the team’s lead to 10-4. Highland then pulled away for the win, getting five straight points from Reagan Maibach, four from Kline and three from Jossalyn Varney to close out the match in straight sets.
Rob Terrill noted that, as his team plays through the second half of the MOAC schedule, a big goal is to try to improve on their performances the first time through.
“The second time through the league, we want to do better than the first time and see whether we’re improving or they’re improving,” he said. “Obviously, with the Pleasant game, I thought they did a tremendous job. We couldn’t get them out of their system and their middle scored 10 and she had two kills against us the first time, so they took that one. But tonight, we outscored them more than the first time we played them, so we’re going to take that as a sign of improvement. We’re going to need to work hard tomorrow and Monday at practice to get ready for Shelby next week.”
Rob Hamilton can be reached at 419-946-3010, ext. 1807. Connect with him on Twitter at @SportsMCS
