Girls volleyball: Buffalo Grove keeps right attitude, sweeps Rolling Meadows
Senior and four-year varsity player Cameron Damm said her Buffalo Grove team, under first-year coach Tara Braceros, plays with a certain mindset.
"One mistake does not make a game," she said. "It's 25 points."
At the end of each set in Thursday's Mid-Suburban East match against visiting Rolling Meadows, the points were coming fast and furious for the Bison.
They outscored Meadows 9-1 to close out the first game, then scored the final 3 points in set 2 — with back-to-back kills by Olivia Hill to end it — for a 25-15, 25-21 victory over the defending East champs.
"It's staying together as a team, and supporting each other," said Damm who along with classmate Tetiana Kutsyk led BG with 6 kills apiece followed by Hill (sophomore rightside), who put down four kills late in the second set. She also had 2 blocks, 5 digs and an ace in the match.
BG improved to 7-4 and 2-0 in the East while Meadows stands at 10-4 and 0-2, with its other East loss coming in three sets to Barrington (26-24 in third set).
"They're (BG) a tough team to stop from siding out," said Meadows coach Jack Nickle. "Typically we rely on our service pressure but they pass real well and have a lot of big physical hitters. I don't think we were quite aggressive enough to take them out of system and we didn't do enough to make it hard enough on their big hitter to get kills."
Libero Ava Lo Verde (5 digs) got the Bison rolling with 2 aces to start the match. The lead went to 4-1 on a block by Damm (3 blocks) and then 6-2 on a slide kill by Damm.
"The nice thing about having points and middles who are terminal is that they spread out our offense and open things up," Braceros said. "So we had some really nice balls. We set Cameron on the slide and that really opened up the outside and middle of the court for our pins to come in and terminate."
Meadows got to within 6-5 on an ace by junior Bella Zielinski (team-high 9 kills) and a kill by classmate Giselle Vasquez.
"Bella has grown a lot as a player," Nickle said. "And it's nice to see her step into a leadership role now that she is playing six rotations."
Meadows was within 16-14 on a crosscourt kill by Zielinski before BG closed out the set on a 9-1 run, getting 2 kills each from Damm and Kutsyk (2 aces) and one from senior Amelia Palubski.
"We really continued to run our offense smoothly and I truly believe if we can take care of our first-ball contact, we can beat anyone," said Braceros, who had been the head coach at Elk Grove where she also starred as a player. "Our offense is strong all the way around."
Running that offense were junior Taylor Rickman (9 assists) and sophomore Alex Tohter (8 assists).
"I think the key is we really work well together as a team," Damm added. "We hype each other up. Coming into the huddle we make sure everyone feels they belong."
The Bison have shown they belong in the MSL East this fall.
"It's a great start for us in our new conference," Braceros said. "We've won both our matches in straight sets this week (Hoffman Estates on Tuesday).
"What's really been impressive is how Alex has been dealing with an injury and we brought Taylor up from the junior varsity and she has really stepped up."