Rosary's strong starts deny Glenbard South

To prepare for Thursday's girls volleyball sectional final against second-seeded Rosary, Glenbard South coach Chad Grant and his assistants used Wednesday's practice to hit the volleyball at their players as hard as they could.

It still wasn't enough to prepare for the hard-hitting Royals.

Rosary used its firepower to get off to a good start in each game, winning the Class 3A Montini sectional championship 25-21, 25-17 in Lombard. The Royals (27-12) will play Marian Central at Saturday afternoon's Marian Central supersectional.

"They had really good servers coming at us right off the bat," Grant added. "The libero (Martha Konovodoff), I've seen her in multiple matches get them off to a fast start, and she's tough, tough to stop. It gets on you quick. Offensively, they just kind of overwhelmed us a little bit. We knew coming in their middles were going to be tough to stop. They have such a high contact point they were just hitting over the top of us a lot of the time."

Rosary took leads of 5-1, 10-4 and 13-7 in Game 1 and never let the fourth-seeded Raiders (23-16) get closer than 19-17.

"Tuesday we did basically the same thing and we let them back in," Rosary coach Rachel Fox said of a semifinal victory against Fenwick, "and we did that a little bit in the first game today. I think it was going and learning we could get a few points and keep going. You can push and push and push. And that's huge. It wasn't the same as last Tuesday."

Instead of letting the Raiders get closer, Rosary answered with an Erin Burke kill, a Maya Sullivan and Julia Madeline Bryan block kill and a Lauren Brummel kill.

Just like that the lead was 22-17, and the Royals were on their way to winning the game.

It worked out just the way the Royals talked about at practice Wednesday.

"Yesterday we actually talked with our coaches about ways we can (stop a Raiders run), and one of them was to keep going by intervals of 3 or 2 or 5. Something to keep us in the mode of let's keep going and not lose a bunch of points," Konovodoff said.

Game 2 played out a lot like Game 1 did. Rosary scored the first four points and eventually built a 23-13 lead.

"We definitely came in with the mindset of this is a once-in-a-lifetime type of game and we just had to attack it," Konovodoff said. " ... We just kept fighting and fighting and fighting, and I think that's what got us over the top."

It was too much for the Raiders.

"If we were going to win today, we were going to have to do it with our serving and pull them off the net and take their middles out of the game and make them predictable, which is easier said than done," Grant said. "We just weren't able to do it."

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