Lake Park pulls out victory

The veteran program came away with the sweep in Tuesday’s Upstate Eight Valley opener, but that’s not to say that the upstart program didn’t prove a thing or two along the way.

Perennial conference contender Lake Park (10-2, 1-0) held off visiting Metea Valley 25-19, 25-22 in Roselle, but the upstart Mustangs rebounded from a slow start to make things interesting in Game 1 and then battled the Lancers to the wire in the nightcap before coming up short.

The Lancers stormed ahead 14-5 behind some strong serving by Michael Ragan and Kevin Smith in the opener, yet Metea Valley (10-3, 0-1) closed to within 20-17 before the hosts claimed the game following kills by Andrew Hochstadt and Mike Dickerson. The Mustangs cleaned up their serve receive some in Game 2 and led by as many as four before the Lancers completed the two-game triumph.

“We came out mistake-free, and I think they might have been a little shaky on serve receive seeing those jump serves,” first-year Lake Park coach Tim Murphy said of Metea. “In the second game they settled in much more with serve receive.”

Ragan, who had a match-high 8 kills as well as a pair of aces, said the Lancers need to work a little harder to close out matches.

“We made too many mistakes towards the end,” the 6-foot-3 senior outside hitter said. “Our serving was strong tonight, but we’ve just got to finish better.”

Some of the credit goes to the Mustangs, however, as the visitors regrouped from that 14-5 hole in the opener to announce themselves as a team to be reckoned with this spring in the Upstate Eight. Adam Miller led the attack with 5 kills, while Peter Hebda had 3 kills and 6-6 middle hitter Shiv Desai had a pair of big blocks in the second game as Metea threw a scare into the Lancers.

Mustangs coach John Aister was happy to see his players fight back from a little adversity. But that’s not to say he was looking for any moral victories at Lake Park.

“Am I happy that we fought back, yeah,” he said. “The second game was a better showing for sure. But I’m still a little unhappy with the result. We didn’t play as well as we could have.”

In the second game the Mustangs led 10-7 following a kill from Martin Krasuski and an error by Lake Park and later led 13-9 after another Krasuski spike. But the Lancers managed to complete the sweep after back-to-back kills by Dickerson turned a late 23-22 lead into a game- and match-ending 25-22 final.