Early wakeup call jolts Falcons

Non-tournament Saturday mornings usually means sleeping in to the Wheaton North girls volleyball team.

Carole Kristensen had other ideas this past weekend.

"We really didn't have some good practices at the end of last week," said the Falcons coach, "so I brought them in on Saturday. They got yelled at a lot and I'm not a yeller."

An 8 a.m. Saturday practice must have provided some sort of wake-up call, as the Falcons knocked off cross-town rival Wheaton Warrenville South 25-16, 26-24 on Monday night at Wheaton North.

"I wish I could have slept in," said Falcons junior outside Kelsey Ullrich, "but I'll take this victory."

The Falcons were early risers on Monday.

They scored the first 6 points of Game 1, Coco Bassi and Kelsey Kulow accounting for early kills.

Kulow's third kill made it 8-2. Wheaton North (5-4, 2-1 DuPage Valley Conference) never trailed in the first game, an Ullrich kill finishing things off.

The Falcons' serve receive was spot on, and it started with senior libero Megan Thornton.

"Megan passed very well," Kristensen said. "We used our passing and our serving as a weapon."

"It's really nice when you get a good pass," sophomore setter Katie Thornton said, "and can run everything."

On the flip side, WW South (6-3, 2-1) was clearly out of sync.

"We were out of system 13 times in Game 1," WW South coach Bill Schreier said. "Credit to their serving, but more importantly I don't think we did a very good job of reacting to things. I think we were caught kind of flat-footed and their libero passed incredibly well."

The Tigers came alive in Game 2, and led 16-11 after a Monika Stanciauskas tip kill. It was 20-16 after Shealyn Kolosky put down a kill for WW South, but the Tigers committed 2 errors sandwiched around a Katie Thornton ace to make it 20-19. Another Tigers error tied it at 21-21. Three more ties ensued, before a Lauren Ralph block and Liz Gulick aced capped a Falcons comeback.

"When it came down to it," Katie Thornton said, "we didn't want to take it to a third game. We didn't want to risk it. We wanted to finish it right there."

Stanciauskas and Allie Wiesbrock each had 5 kills for WW South.

"You don't want to put yourself in that position where anything can make a difference between winning and losing," Schreier said, "and we did. Hopefully we'll learn from this. We had some people that needed to step up and that that point and they didn't."

Ullrich had 8 kills, Gulick 7 and Kulow 5 for Wheaton North. Katie Thornton had 20 assists.

"We tried as hard as we could for our seniors to win this last home game against (WW South)," Ullrich said. "This feels great."