Tigers get back on track, sweep Falcons
The Wheaton Warrenville South girls volleyball team has a message to send to the rest of the DuPage Valley Conference, as well as any other team that may take notice: its recent two-game spell of below-average play is over.
The Tigers swept aside their neighbors to the north 25-13, 25-15 on the Falcons' home court Thursday night, affirming libero Meg Hecker's contention that Wheaton Warrenville South is back on track.
"This last week we kind of were slacking as a team together. We weren't playing together, and the smaller things were getting to us," Hecker said. "In practice recently we've been working on that, so we're just going to have to work harder.
"We're proud of tonight because now we're back."
The Tigers (16-1, 6-0 DuPage Valley Conference) jumped out to an 11-3 lead in the first game, thanks in part to a pair of Monika Stanciauskas kills.
Wheaton Warrenville South pushed their lead to a game-high 12 points after Annie Luhrsen notched her second ace of the game. The Tigers aced Wheaton North five times in the match, continuing their season-long trend of getting things started at the service line.
"These girls are aggressive servers," Wheaton Warrenville South coach Bill Schreier said. "Then couple that with the fact that we're pretty aggressive offensively, and we like to think that if we can continue to play that way it's going to be a challenge for everyone against us."
The aggressive Tigers offense wields many weapons, posing a positive problem for Schreier to solve.
"We've got to figure out how to use them all. That (comes with) familiarity," he said. "That's getting more comfortable with each other and figuring out what can be done in certain situations."
Wheaton North (8-8, 3-3) improved at the outset of Game 2, hanging around the Tigers as late as 15-10. From that point though, the Tigers ran off a 10-5 streak to close out the match, highlighted by 3 Kathryn Kane kills.
According to Falcons coach Carole Kristensen, her girls came out of the gates playing uncharacteristically timid.
"They came out looking scared," Kristensen said. "Our fundamentals just kind of fell apart. We had overpasses, we had serving errors, we had some ball control errors … basically the things that we shouldn't be doing.
"When we've been getting beat, we've been getting beat because we've been playing hard, and we didn't show up with that tonight."