West Aurora wins its own girls volleyball tournament

The West Aurora girls volleyball was all business at its home invitational on Saturday.

Jordyn Poppen had half of her team-leading 30 kills in the Blackhawks' final two matches to lead West Aurora to the 12-team title.

Poppen had a match-high 8 kills in the championship final against Plainfield South as the Blackhawks scored the first 5 points of the opening set to never trail and capped off their day by accumulating 23 of the final second-game 28 points in Aurora.

The teams entered the last of five matches with identical 4-0 records on the day, but the Blackhawks employed a dominant service game in handing the Cougars a 25-19, 25-10 defeat in Aurora.

"It's definitely an exciting feeling," Poppen said of West Aurora claiming its home invitational to improve to 10-3 on the season. "We have a lot of good players on the team this year. We support each other a lot. We couldn't have done it without each other."

Senior Kelly Townsend, in what would be a match-long trend, staked West Aurora to a 5-0 first-set lead from the service line.

Plainfield South would never come within 3 points the remainder of the game as West Aurora won all 5 of its matches in straight sets.

The Blackhawks also defeated Genoa-Kingston, Evergreen Park, Bartlett and Sycamore to win their first home title in three years.

Grace VanDorn had a 6-point service run in the second set to usher in a match-altering run that turned an early 5-2 deficit into a runaway freight train.

Plainfield South (7-4) simply had no answer to the Blackhawks' serving prowess as the team had 5 of its 7 aces in the second game.

Gillian Jones was the glue to the Blackhawks' team cohesiveness as the junior had 6 digs, 4 kills and 3 aces in the championship match.

Two of Jones' aces were clean winners as part of her match-ending 5-point service run.

"Our coach (Kevin Mortlock) always puts in our minds that serving wins games," Jones said. "Whenever you're over 20 (points), you want to make as little errors as possible. I just focused on putting the ball away."

Bartlett and South Elgin are both climbing back toward .500 on the young season with the last of their two matches.

Bartlett turned back Streamwood and Romeoville in straight sets to improve to 4-5.

Suzi Arns, Almira Khan and Andie Sobotka were the Hawks' leaders against the Sabres.

"Our offense was really good, and I feel like our defense was there," said Sobotka, who had a match-best 12 digs. "Our serve-receive was good, too. It was overall a good game, I guess."

South Elgin (3-4) defeated Evergreen Park 25-11 and 25-20 to win the third-place pool.

"There are a lot of good things we're doing," South Elgin coach Joni Plach said. "We can play well against good teams. It's just a matter of finishing the match."

The Storm leaders were Rachel Prior (22 kills, 25 digs), Phoebe Duncan (30 kills, 7 aces), Casey Swanson (30 assists, 12 aces, 15 digs), Julia Salvador (34 assists) and Sarah Murray (34 digs).

Streamwood is still in search of its first win after a fruitless tournament.

"From the first match of the season until now, they have definitely improved a little bit," Streamwood coach Lisa Harrison said. "They're getting used to the varsity level of play."

Ashley Rothenberg was the Sabres' best performer.