Girls volleyball: Prairie Ridge takes care of Dundee-Crown

The Prairie Ridge girls volleyball team kept its perfect record in tact Tuesday night by beating Dundee Crown, 25-21, 25-15 in a Fox Valley Conference match in Carpentersville.

The win raised the Wolves' mark to 5-0, all against league opponents.

In addition to the win, coach Stefanie Otto was also pleased with improvements the team has made in serving and blocking.

"I always love a win, anyway you can get one," Otto said. "Our serving got better tonight. We usually missed 10 or 11 serves a match and tonight we only missed three so that was helpful."

"And once we started focusing on our blocking, I thought that helped us get into our system a lot better, too."

PR had a balanced attack with four players making a total of 28 kills in the match. Isabella McGowan and Erin McNeil each had 8 spikes while teammates Genesis Sheridan and Emily Baudin both made 6.

"We were hoping to at least push them to 3 games," said D-C coach Christine Hopkins-Muehl. "We thought that was doable, especially with our first game going pretty well at the start."

The Chargers (2-3, 2-3) jumped out to a 5-0 lead in the first set before the Wolves scored a point. PR tied it at 8 on a McNeil ace. The lead seesawed between the two squads until a Sheridan kill put the Wolves out front for good at 18-17.

"I was pleased with our performance in game one. We knew we had to control the things we could control - our serves and our service receives," Hopkins-Muehl said. "I thought we didn't do too bad on the service receives. We knew that they are strong and they could execute when they needed to. Unfortunately we couldn't quite turn around."

After D-C tied the second set at 2-2, PR took control, going on a 10-5 run to put the game away.

"Unfortunately we lost a little steam there in the second game and we had some movement errors that we couldn't overcome," said Hopkins-Muehl.

"Ayana Gard did a real nice job for us tonight. She stayed aggressive and she was rewarded," Hopkins-Muehle said. "She got 5 kills, 1 ace, 6 digs and a block."

Emma Brand and Paige Gieseke both scored 3 kills for the Chargers while teammate Alexandra Buckley earned 7 digs and 12 assists.