Benet gets victory against Sandburg
Benet coach Brad Baker didn't like something when he took a timeout with his team trailing 10-9 in the second game of its Class 4A sectional semifinal against Sandburg on Tuesday at Lyons Twp.
"We were losing," Baker said. "I didn't like that."
That was the last time Benet trailed in the match. A 6-1 run put the Redwings back in command and the sectional's top seed went on to defeat the Eagles, 25-21. 25-19, to advance to Thursday's girls volleyball championship game against Mother McAuley at 6 p.m.
Tiffany Clark led Benet (36-2) with 9 kills and 13 digs, junior Veronica Snelling added 8 kills, junior setter Sara Nielsen added 24 assist and libero Lauren Barnes had 14 digs.
"You have to expect things to go back and forth," Baker said. "People are going to have runs in these matches. Whoever can sustain it afterwards and come back and not break are the teams that are going to end up winning. Everyone's going to go on runs. It's how you react afterward."
The Redwings trailed 7-6 in Game 1 before scoring 8 unanswered points behind the serving of Lauren Keating. Sandburg (30-8) used a 5-0 run that included 3 kills by Gillian Thanasouras to get within 16-13, but Benet responded by scoring 6 of the next 7 points.
"We always know that any team that we play is going to come out with a ton of energy," Snelling said. "We just have to match that energy. We knew we had to come out with more energy in the second set and clean it up a little bit. We knew what we needed to fix. I think we did that a lot better."
Two of Gretchen Rudel's 3 kills and 3 kills from Snelling were part of a 14-6 run that put the Redwings comfortably ahead at 23-16 in Game 2.
"I knew I needed to pick it up and help my team," said Snelling, who sat out Benet's loss to McAuley at Glenbard East with an injury. "Every single game I play after this is a big game and I need to play for my team. The back row was doing a great job picking balls up and I needed to be there for them."
Lauren Berta added 3 kills and 2 blocks for Benet.
"They came after us real hard," Nielsen said. "It took us a while to get the nerves out or something. (The Eagles) played really well the whole match. We just had up pick it up and clean up our game."
Sandburg got 10 kills from Thanasouras, 7 kills from Anna Jonynas and 20 assists and a kill from setter Emily Makina.
"We've never had an issue defensively," Sandburg coach David Vales said. "Offensively, we didn't play our best, believe it or not. We needed to pick up our serve-receive, we saw some ball handling errors, and those things against Benet are going to kill you."