Lee Sweeps Mount Greylock to Go to 9-1
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- The Lee volleyball team had a two-set lead but was locked in a back-and-forth battle in the third in Friday’s showdown at Mount Greylock.
Then. Rachel Wendling got the serve.
The senior served four straight points -- three aces and a Kylie Joyce kill -- to establish a 14-10 Wildcats lead, and Lee went on to a 25-20, 25-22, 25-19 win to improve to 9-1 this fall and knock Mount Greylock from the ranks of the unbeaten.
“I feel like our team is really good at bringing each other up, so when someone gets excited, you want to keep it going and bring the other people up,” Wendling said of the run. “Just having really good teammates helps with that.”
It also helped to have the right server in place when the team needed a lift.
“Rachel has been one of our strong servers,” Lee coach Julia Warner said. “She serves the ball deep and flat and hard. She’s able to apply enough service pressure to force the other team out of system.
“That’s when we work the best, when we stay in system and force the other team out of system.”
Wendling had four aces in the game to go with 18 digs.
Liz Brown had a double-double with 13 kills and 10 digs, and Makayla Schuerer distributed 23 assists and pulled up seven digs.
Takiera Darrow led Mount Greylock with 10 kills, including one to give the Mounties a 10-9 lead in the third set as they battled to stay in the match.
Lee trailed by as many as four points in the early stages of the set, but Warner chose to let her squad figure things out for themselves.
“One of the referees said he was looking at me to see if I was going to call a timeout,” Warner said. “But I have a lot of trust in these girls. There are some seasoned veterans right next door to some veterans who are learning a lot. It’s just a great group of kids to coach.”
Lee never really trailed until early in that third set.
In the opener, the Mounties led 8-6 after a Charlotte Coody block on Darrow’s serve, but the Wildcats got a sideout and a six-point run by Schuerer to take control.
It was 13-9 when she lost the serve, and Lee never led by fewer than four points the rest of the way.
In the second set, Joyce put away a kill at 10-10 to get Lee the lead and a sideout, and she served the next two points to make it a three-point advantage that the Wildcats never relinquished.
Coody finished with three blocks and three kills for the Mounties. Celina Savage and Jackie Brannan had five kills apiece.
Mount Greylock coach Greg Geyer said Lee’s experience in the back was a big difference in the contest.
“They have three seniors playing their back row passing,” Geyer said. “Last year, when we played them, we had our seniors back row. That was a big difference.
“I’m incredibly proud of how [our] team is growing. Takeira [Darrow] played a great game, and Celina [Savage] turned it on in that third set.”
In addition to Lee’s passing, Geyer said Brown’s finishing and the Wildcats’ outside hitting overall gave the Mounties fits. But, that said, he would not mind getting another shot at Lee -- this year, for the first time, not a county opponent.
“Our best plays of the year came here tonight,” he said. “This was our litmus test. This was the toughest team we’ve played so far. And we’re looking forward to seeing them in the D5 playoffs. The way things are set up this year, there’s no Western Mass, so we could have two teams from Berkshire County in the finals. It could be us and them. I hope we see them again. I think they’re awesome.”
Lee certainly has had an awesome week, beating, in the space of five days, the Fall 2 Berkshire County champs (Wahconah), the 2019 Western Mass champs (Frontier) and the previously unbeaten Mounties.
“They’ve been playing so well that we came into tonight confident that if we continue to play our game and pass the way that we have and hit with the efficiency that we have, we would ultimately come out on top,” Warner said. “And that was our outcome. It’s all good.”