advertisement

Boys volleyball: Lake Park defeats Naperville North

The kids can play.

Six-foot-5 sophomore middle hitter Nick Martinski had 12 kills and 6-2 sophomore outside Jordan Haigh added 9 kills and 2 blocks as Lake Park stayed within striking distance of the DuPage Valley Conference lead with a 27-25, 23-25, 25-23 victory Tuesday at Naperville North.

Junior setter Justin Yost added 33 assists for the Lancers (20-9, 2-1), whose only conference loss came at the hands of Wheaton Warrenville South.

"The future's bright," said Lake Park coach Tim Murphy, whose team was coming off a strong performance at the Lincoln-Way East tournament last weekend. "We're a young team, but these guys are starting to play with more maturity than what they are. We start two sophomores, we're starting some juniors, but they don't play like a bunch of sophomores and juniors.

"We're starting to play the mental game," he added. "Something that we've been preaching all season is that the smarter team is generally the team that's going to win. We made some adjustments at the end of Game 3. The last slide run that we ran was an adjustment call based on what happened on the play before, and I'm just proud that they executed out of a timeout how we practice it."

After the teams split the first two games, Martinski and Haigh rallied the Lancers from an early 7-4 deficit in Game 3. Martinski broke a tie at 15-15 with one of his 7 kills in the third set and Haigh's block gave Lake Park a 21-19 advantage.

After a kill by Jack Fischer extended Lake Park's advantage to 24-21, a Casey Hiller block got the Huskies (17-12, 2-1) within 24-23. But after a Lake Park timeout, Martinski put away a backset from Yost to beat the Naperville North block and end the 90-minute slugfest.

"We just go out there and play our game," said Haigh, who played front row exclusively on the JV team as a freshman before working over the summer to become a six-rotation player. "We're a good team and we play together. This should give us some momentum going into the rest of the conference schedule."

Fischer had 14 kills and 2 blocks to pace Lake Park. Naperville North got 11 kills from Michael Jennings, 8 kills and 4 blocks from Hiller, 8 kills from Derek Amend and 27 assists from Kyle Josupait.

"Lake Park is really good," Naperville North coach Nate Bornancin said. "They're young, too, so they have a bright future ahead of them, and they got that amazing sectional that every team wants to be in so they're going to get some good experience this year in the playoffs.

"I like the way our guys battled today," he added. "It was two pretty evenly matched teams. They just made a play at the end. They went to their middle with the ball behind which they'd only gone to maybe twice the entire match. They made that play at the end, it was pretty good."

"We've battled all season," Murphy said. "We've been down in lot a games and we've never given up. We've always battled back. What I could always say about them is that they stick together as a team. They don't turn on each other and they keep fighting the fight."

Article Comments
Guidelines: Keep it civil and on topic; no profanity, vulgarity, slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked. If a comment violates these standards or our terms of service, click the "flag" link in the lower-right corner of the comment box. To find our more, read our FAQ.