Highland’s Reagan Maibach prepares to knock the ball over the net to Harding in her team’s 3-0 home win on Tuesday.
Rob Hamilton | Morrow County Sentinel
After an early-season schedule that saw his Highland volleyball team compete in a number of lengthy and intense matches, Rob Terrill was ready for a routine night at the court.
The Scots delivered at home against Marion Harding on Tuesday, earning a three-set win by scores of 25-11, 25-9 and 25-10.
“We’ve played five, five, four and five, so it was nice to play a three,” said Terrill after the win. “It was nice, too, all three of our levels won tonight. That’s the first time we’ve won all three levels this year. We’ve been struggling that way, so it’s good to get that in there.”
The coach added that it was important to earn a quick win, as his team is in the midst of a busy portion of the schedule, with two more games during the week and a full slate of competition during the next.
“By next Saturday, we’ll have played half our season,” he said. “We front-loaded our schedule, so we’re in a playing-every-other-day thing right now. We wanted to come out tonight, settle in, play consistent, make them play at our level and just see how consistent they can be and they did a great job.”
The Scots never trailed in the match and were only tied once, at 2-2 in the third set, in picking up the win. Three points by Larsen Terrill and two from Camryn Miller helped stake the team to a 10-3 lead early in the first set.
Harding would get three straight points to close within a four-point margin, but Highland pulled away down the stretch, getting four straight points by Terrill to open up a 17-8 lead and five in a row from Miller to close out the set.
After opening the second set with a defensive point, the Scots got four in a row by Savanna Sanborn and would never look back. Three points by Kameron Stover brought the team’s advantage up to an 11-2 margin and then, with the score 13-4, Highland would get three points by Addison Mullins and six more from Terrill to help them go up 2-0 in the match.
One thing that pleased Rob Terrill about the match was that he was able to play a lot of his younger players due to having a big lead for most of the night.
“We had Mia Stanco back tonight,” he said. “It’s the first time she’s played this year. She’s been off with an injury. We were able to play the rest of the girls, too. Just get them into some sequences where they really had to play, so that was good for us.”
The score would be tied at 2-2 early in the third set, but the Scots got a defensive point to regain the lead and then picked up five in a row off the serve of Kendal Kline to surge to a commanding lead. Five from Mullins and two each by Miller and Kline would allow Highland to continually extend their lead on their way to earning the 3-0 sweep of their MOAC opponents.
Terrill had a big night for Highland, finishing with 25 assists, seven kills, 11 digs and three aces. Stover tallied 18 kills, while Kline and Sanborn totaled nine aces.
While Rob Terrill would have preferred it if his team had played a couple other three-set matches, instead of going four or five in each previous outing, he noted that the level of competition Highland faced should pay dividends in league play.
“Certainly, the competition was great,” he said. “Jonathan Alder on Saturday, we had 123 digs and obviously Kammy (Stover) set the school record with kills. We got a lot of play in. It was two-and-a-half hours and we didn’t get out of here until 3:15 on Saturday. It was just a lot of play, but luckily, we had Sunday off and we could regroup yesterday and we had a nice, clean game tonight, so I was happy.”
Rob Hamilton can be reached at 419-946-3010, ext. 1807. Connect with him on Twitter at @SportsMCS
