Benet looks good against Mother McAuley in girls volleyball

Tiffany Clark was unstoppable. Lauren Barnes was unflappable. Together they were invincible.

Clark had 11 kills, including 8 in a tense second game, and Barnes added 17 digs, including several highlight variety saves, to lead Benet to a 25-14, 25-21 victory over Mother McAuley in the championship match of the Class 4A Lyons girls volleyball sectional.

Benet (37-2) advances to face St. Francis at the Class 4A Bolingbrook supersectional at 1 p.m. Saturday.

Earlier in the year, Clark was ticketed for the libero position and Barnes was slated to ride the bench. But since coach Brad Baker inserted Barnes into the starting lineup and moved Clark to the outside, Benet has gone 31-1. It's only loss was to McAuley in the finals at Glenbard East's Autumnfest tournament.

"You look good when your players play well," Baker said.

Barnes made save after save to extend points and give Benet more opportunities to put balls away Thursday. Yet even after a convincing Game 1 win, the 5-foot-6 junior was still battling butterflies.

"I had a lot of nerves," she said. "They stuck with me the whole match but I played through them. My mindset on the floor is don't let the ball drop. If I see a ball, I go for it automatically. I don't want the ball to hit the floor without me going for it."

Veronica Snelling was the beneficiary of Barnes' defense in the first set when the 5-10 junior hitter had 5 of her 8 kills.

"We had a game plan," Baker said. "Our assistants do a great job. The kids then have to follow it and be in the right spot. That's where kids typically hit a couple of shots. If you want to be in the right spot and know where to go, you can get a lot of digs and Barnes did that."

The second game required the heroics of Clark, who sandwiched 2 of her 8 second-set kills between a pair of blocks from Lauren Berta as the Redwings rallied from a 15-14 deficit with 6 unanswered points.

"We definitely started getting the momentum to our side," Clark said. "We knew they were going to come out better and we had to come out with our best. I thought (beating McAuley) last year was great, but this is even better."

Sara Nielsen had 20 assists, 11 digs and 4 aces for Benet, which also got 4 kills from Lina Lietuvninkas, 3 blocks from Berta, and a lengthy service run in Game 1 and a pivotal ace in Game 2 from Laura Keating.

Missouri-bound Kayla Caffey led McAuley (31-9) with 4 kills and 2 blocks and Jane DeJarld had 14 assists and 2 kills.

"It was definitely a surprise to me that we came out so tentative because the girls have been so confident the second part of our season and playing at a whole other level," McAuley coach Jen DeJarld said. "We weren't executing our passing, we were avoiding the block and just making a ton of unforced errors."

Benet moves on to meet St. Francis, the top-ranked team in the state, according to Prepvolleyball.com.

"We had a rough start at the beginning of the year," Clark said. "We had a whole lot of young players with some of our veterans. But we kept improving. We knew that the team at the beginning of the year was not us.

"We knew what it took to be a state championship team," she added. "We're still not there. We still have so much more work we have to do in order to get there."